Part 11

But upon the outbreak of war this state of affairs underwent a sudden change. It was no more possible for the Quartermaster Corps, as it was then organized, to feed and clothe and transport overseas an army of 5,000,000 men than it would be for a village merchant to meet the demands which would be made upon him if oil were discovered in the vicinity and the village expanded into a city overnight. At the outbreak of the war the Office of the Quartermaster-General consisted of five divisions—Administrative, Finance, Supplies, Construction, and Transportation—but when our stupendous military programme began to assume definite form it became increasingly apparent that no single department could successfully direct so many and varied activities, and that the Quartermaster Corps must confine itself to the huge task of purchase and supply. The first step toward its reorganization along these lines was the divorce of the Construction Division, which was made a separate branch of the War Department under Colonel (later Brigadier-General) I. W. Littell, who reported directly to the secretary of war. Though the officers of this division, to which was assigned the tremendous task of constructing the camps and cantonments for our new armies, continued to wear the insignia of the Quartermaster Corps, and though they were known as construction quartermasters, they had no connection with the Office of the Quartermaster-General. During the first year of the war the Transportation Division operated a considerable fleet of vessels engaged in the transport of troops, animals, and supplies, but in April, 1918, this division was abolished, the entire transportation service being taken from the Quartermaster Corps and placed with the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the General Staff. The next branch to be lopped off was the Finance Division, the functions of which were transferred to the newly organized Office of the Director of Finance, who assumed charge of all financial matters for the army. In response to the constantly increasing demands for motor transport, a Motor Transport Service was added to the Quartermaster Corps in April, 1918, but was taken away from it three months later and established as a separate branch of the army under the title of the Motor Transport Corps. This is, however, strictly an operating unit and should not be confused with the Motor and Vehicles Division of the Quartermaster Corps. By this time the “Q. M.” had been so completely transformed as to be almost unrecognizable to men who had grown old in the service. Little remained of the old organization, indeed, save the name, and even that all but disappeared when, in October, 1918, the Office of the Quartermaster-General was merged in the newly organized Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage. By the concluding month of the war, therefore, the old Quartermaster Corps had lost all control over construction, finance, and transportation, so that of its original five divisions only the Administrative and Supplies remained. The latter had been expanded, however, into nine purchasing divisions and there had also been added to the organization—now commonly referred to as “Purchase and Storage”—five storage divisions and a Salvage Division. At the same time that the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage assumed the functions of the Quartermaster Corps it also took over the procurement activities of the Medical Corps and of the Corps of Engineers, as well as procuring certain standardized articles for the Signal Corps and the Ordnance Department, thus bringing under a single head all the purchase, storage, and distribution agencies of the army. In order to make this extremely involved relationship a little clearer, I ought to explain, perhaps, that the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage is one of the three chief operating branches of the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the General Staff, the others being the Office of the Director of Traffic and the Office of the Director of Finance.

In the old days the procurement activities of the army were decentralized to such an extent that every depot, camp, and post, wherever situated, had charge of procuring practically everything it used except uniforms, the procurement being under the direction of the camp or post quartermaster, as the case might be. The new organization has produced a system, however, whereby everything required by the army is purchased either by the officers in charge of the thirteen General Supply Zones into which the United States has been divided, or direct from Washington. It is scarcely necessary to comment on the enormous saving in time, money, and labor thus effected. We will now say “Amen” to this little sermon on organization, which is a dry subject at best, and turn to more interesting topics.

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Of the countless problems which confronted the Quartermaster Corps at the outbreak of the war, by far the most important was that of feeding the army, for an army, as Napoleon inelegantly but truthfully put it, travels upon its belly. The American soldier, like the American small boy, is a prodigious eater and he is always hungry. He is, moreover, extremely finical about the quality and variety of his food. He has been accustomed from boyhood to have unrestricted access to the cooky jar and the cake-box, and things were wrong, indeed, when there were not at least three kinds of mother’s pies on the top shelf in the pantry. He laughed at danger and jeered at hardships, but in return he expected a grateful Uncle Sam, as represented by the Quartermaster Corps, to show the same consideration for him when it came to a question of food that his mother had always done. And Uncle Sam measured up to his expectations. Not only was the American soldier given all the food that he required—at the time of the Armistice approximately 10,000,000 pounds of food were being sent every day to the troops in France—but he had the best food in Europe. In those lean days of 1918, when it was impossible to obtain a spoonful of sugar in the smartest restaurants in Paris, and when the manufacture of pastries of every description had been prohibited by law, the Yankee doughboys always had full sugar-bowls and unlimited quantities of pies, cake, and puddings. Indeed, it is not the slightest exaggeration to say that the American enlisted man had a considerably better mess than most French generals. I know, for I have eaten with both.

Never before has an army been called upon to send subsistence so great a distance to so many men. It was obviously impossible to ask France and England to provide for our rapidly increasing armies from their own scanty stores, for those countries were already rationing their civilian populations. The food had, therefore, to be obtained in the United States, some of it being transported 6,000 miles before reaching the mess-tables of the A. E. F. Moreover, in order to provide against the possibility of the food-ships being torpedoed or the capture of the base depots, it was necessary to send two pounds of food where one would ordinarily have answered. To make things worse, as the demands for food increased, the available tonnage decreased. The utmost economy in space became so imperative, indeed, that inspectors from the Packing Service Branch were stationed at the various depots with instructions to pay particular attention to the thickness of lumber used in the packing-cases and to insist on the utilization of every cubic foot of spare space, as, for example, the boilers in rolling kitchens, which were filled with various articles of subsistence supplies. Even the marmites—the camp cooking-pots—were filled with beans, peas, and other dry stores. When, in the spring of 1918, the Germans launched that tremendous offensive which has been so fittingly called “the charge of a nation,” and every available ton of shipping was required for the transport of the troops which we were rushing overseas to stem the Teutonic onslaught, all canned fruits and vegetables—pears, apples, pineapple, peas, corn, asparagus, sweet potatoes—were stricken from the lists, such space as was available being filled with boneless beef, dried fruits, dehydrated vegetables—and tomatoes! I do not mean to imply that such mainstays as the “four B’s”—bread, bacon, beef, and beans—were sacrificed for the juicy fruit of the tomato-vine, for they were not, but tomatoes were regarded as such an important item of the soldier’s menu that, notwithstanding the poverty of space, their shipments, instead of being diminished, were increased. In addition to the customary ways of serving them, thousands of cans were taken up to the line to relieve the soldier’s thirst, a quart of tomato juice being more effective than a gallon of water. Lest you should get the impression, from what I have just said, that there was a shortage of beans, I might mention, in passing, that 75,000,000 cans of baked beans with tomato sauce were put in the hands of the army cooks, and in order to provide against any possible lack of this stand-by, there was purchased to supplement them 77,000,000 pounds of dried beans. I have never heard an American soldier complain that he did not have enough beans. Foreseeing the enormous demand which there would be for prunes and dried apricots and apples, the quartermaster-general summoned from his ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of California, where he was living in pleasant retirement, the foremost authority on dried fruits in America, informed him of the army’s needs, and gave him _carte blanche_ to fill them. He sent overseas enough prunes to have supplied all the boarding-houses in America for years to come. Coffee was another important item. The British Army consumed enormous quantities of tea, the Italians depended largely upon their cheap native wines, and the French drank an alleged coffee which was really camouflaged chicory, but the American troops were given real coffee—the best that money could buy. Nothing better illustrates the quality of the food served to our men than the following telegram, sent by the quartermaster-general of the A. E. F. to Washington.

“Ship 2,000,000 reserve rations packed in hermetically sealed galvanized iron cases, 25 to the case, meat to be substituted in lieu of bacon and choice George Washington coffee or other similar substitute in lieu of ground coffee.”

As even the best grades of coffee can be ruined if improperly prepared, there were established at Camp Meade and Camp Johnston schools for coffee-roasting. Here enlisted men were given a course of instruction in coffee roasting, blending, grinding, and packing, and upon graduation were sent to the various camps where coffee-roasting plants had been installed. Thus the soldier received a fresher and a better cup of coffee than ever before, and the government made a saving of from two to three cents a pound, for as the green coffee was shipped to the camps by the various Zone Supply officers and was roasted every day, there was practically no overhead expense incurred.

Beef is, of course, the chief muscle and fat-producing food, the army allowing 456 pounds of beef per year for each soldier. This does not mean, however, that the soldier actually eats that amount of beef annually, for, just as the currency of the country is based on the gold standard, the meat ration of the army is based on the beef standard. It is customary, therefore, to substitute pork, usually in the form of bacon, for 30 per cent of the beef ration, twelve ounces of bacon being equivalent to twenty ounces of beef. The balance of the meat ration consists for the most part of fresh beef, when it is procurable, supplemented by canned beef, corned beef, and canned hash. The meat-cutting for the army is performed by Butchery Companies, the personnel of which was trained at Camp Joseph E. Johnston, near Jacksonville, Florida, where a practical course of instruction was given in cutting meat by the so-called “natural-guide method.” By following this method, which is an expanding rather than a cutting process, inexperienced men who did not know a cleaver from a skewer were made into practical meat-cutters in less than two months. The curriculum of the School for Butchers also included a course of intensive training in the boxing of boneless frozen beef by a method which saved about 32 per cent storage and cargo space and was used extensively during the winter months. With the return of peace, graduates of this unique educational institution, many of them illiterate, find themselves as well qualified to take up the butcher’s trade as though they had wielded a cleaver and worn a white apron all their lives.

In spite of all that has been written by travellers and novelists about certain American delicacies—the ham of Virginia, the chicken of Maryland, the pies and doughnuts of New England, the pompano of New Orleans—the fact remains that Americans, as a people, are not good cooks. This assertion may be ridiculed by some of my readers, but, generally speaking, it is true. Almost any Frenchman can prepare from the cheapest materials a well-cooked and tempting meal; the ability of most Americans in the culinary art is confined to boiling eggs. A man who spends his days in an office can sit down to a breakfast consisting of soggy biscuits, poorly prepared coffee, and an omelet that looks and tastes as though it were made of chrome leather, and though it may affect his disposition it will not seriously affect his work, for when the noon-hour comes around he can go over to Delmonico’s or step into Childs’s, as his tastes and pocketbook may dictate, and restore his balance of digestion by a well-cooked meal. But the soldier had no such resource. There were no Delmonicos or Childses at the front. He had to eat what was given him. And as his vigor and staying powers depended on his food, it was essential that that food should be well cooked. To tell the truth, the Italian débâcle of 1917 was due as much to poor and insufficient food as it was to Austrian propaganda, for nothing affects morale like an empty stomach.

When war was declared the Regular Army and the National Guard already had, of course, their complements of experienced cooks and bakers, though in wholly insufficient numbers, but the huge National Army had nothing of the sort. One of the earliest and most pressing problems of the Quartermaster Corps, therefore, was to train sufficient numbers of men for this work, which it did by expanding the fourteen Cooks’ and Bakers’ Schools of the regular establishment to twenty and by starting new schools at the various National Army cantonments. Before these schools could be successfully operated, however, it was necessary to obtain an adequate staff of instructors, who themselves had to be trained, the plan being to give at least one officer in each regiment or separate battalion sufficient training to make him competent to conduct a school for cooks and bakers in his own organization. As a result of this system of culinary education, within a year after the first American troops set foot in France the Quartermaster Corps had trained 1,200 instructors in cooking, 16,000 mess sergeants, and 50,000 cooks, in addition to which there were 40,000 others who, though they had not received sufficient training to give them a cook’s rating, were nevertheless entirely competent to prepare food. From the soldiers thus trained there were organized about seven-score Bakery Companies, more than half of which saw service overseas. Now that these hundred-odd thousand cooks and bakers have returned to civil life, there is reason to hope that there will be manifested a striking improvement in the quality of the national cooking. It may be that, as a result of this war-enforced training, we will be able to look forward to taking a meal in a railway restaurant or in a small-town hotel without dread and, perhaps, even with pleasure.

The food for the troops in cantonments, camps, and rest billets was, of course, prepared in permanent camp-kitchens, which usually possessed all the facilities and sometimes a far greater serving capacity than the kitchens of great hotels. As the front was approached, however, the problem of preparing food became increasingly difficult, particularly in the areas which were being systematically harassed by the enemy’s artillery and airplanes. To have erected kitchens in such areas would have been to invite their destruction. In order to provide hot food for soldiers occupying these exposed positions, as well as for troops on the march, recourse was had to rolling kitchens—_les cuisines roulantes_, as the French called them. Each kitchen, which was drawn either by a mule-team or by a tractor, consisted of a stove and limber. The stove contained a bake-oven and three kettles, thus permitting of four kinds of food being prepared simultaneously. The limber, which was a two-wheeled cart to which the kitchen was attached, was fitted with four bread-boxes which could also be used for water, a cook’s chest containing a set of culinary utensils which would make a housewife envious, four kettles, and four fireless cookers. The fireless cooker was, I think, first used for military purposes on the Italian Front; at least that was where I first saw it. It was an invaluable contrivance, as it permitted food to be prepared many hours in advance in the back areas and yet served piping hot to the men on the firing-line.

For use under heavy fire or other conditions which made it impossible to serve the men with hot food from the rolling kitchens, the trench ration, consisting of tinned meat, hard bread, and soluble coffee, together with salt and sugar, was designed. The food was packed in hermetically sealed, gas-proof, camouflaged iron containers, each of which held twenty-five rations, each ration in turn consisting of enough food to maintain a soldier for one day, sustaining his full strength and vigor. The food used in the trench ration was the very best that money could buy. Indeed, it became a matter of pride with the employees of the great plants where the trench rations were prepared to use exceptional care in selecting the ingredients for them, for it was realized what good food meant to the tired and mud-caked men who were holding the Frontier of Freedom. The office force of one of the big packing-houses learned from a shipping-clerk that the interstices between the tins in the packing-cases were being filled with excelsior, so they took up a collection, to which every one from president to office-boy contributed, and used the money to fill those interstices with tobacco and cigarettes. When the officers of the Subsistence Division heard of this they thought so well of the idea that orders were issued that the empty space in all trench-ration containers should be filled with tobacco thereafter. Scores of such incidents, trivial enough in themselves, showed how the hearts and thoughts of the nation were with the boys who were fighting overseas.

Every American soldier when he went into action carried in the upper left-hand pocket of his blouse a small flat tin—no larger than the pocket Bible which the sob-story writers always place in that same pocket to stop the fatal bullet—bearing on its lid the legend: “U. S. Army Emergency Ration. Not to be opened except by order of an officer, or in extremity.” This was the American equivalent of the “starvation ration” of the European armies. To it many a man caught in a shell-hole between the lines or lost in the Forest of the Argonne owed his life. Its contents represented the results of many experiments and much experience and the combined suggestions of scientists, food experts, and soldiers. The emergency ration consists of three rather dubious-looking cakes of prepared beef combined with a bread compound made of ground cooked wheat, weighing three ounces each, three ounces of chocolate, three-quarters of an ounce of fine salt, and a dram of black pepper. There are almost as many ways of preparing the ration as there are of preparing an egg. The bread-and-meat cakes can be eaten dry—provided one is sufficiently near starvation. When boiled in three pints of water they make a palatable soup, and when the water was obtained, as was frequently the case, from shell-holes and ditches, the pepper and salt served to disguise the muddy flavor. Where water was scarce, only a pint of it was needed to transform the cake into a sort of porridge, something like cornmeal mush, which could be eaten hot or cold or which could be sliced and fried, circumstances and the Germans permitting. The chocolate could be made into a drink by dissolving it in hot water, or it could be eaten as candy.

Candy, by the way, formed one of the most acceptable items of the American soldier’s ration, half a pound being issued to each man every ten days. In December, 1918, the Subsistence Division shipped to the A. E. F. more than 10,000,000 pounds of candy—the largest exportation of its kind on record. Don’t get the idea that this was “grocer’s candy”—the kind that comes in wooden buckets. It was nothing of the sort. No society girl, sitting in a box at a matinée, munched better chocolates than the American soldier. Moreover, the same chocolates which sold for a dollar a pound in the candy-stores of America could be bought for forty-eight cents a pound in the canteens of the A. E. F. Stick-candy and lemon-drops which ordinarily sold for seventy cents a pound at home were sold to the soldiers for twenty-eight cents. I say _sold_, for the pound and a half of candy which was a part of every soldier’s ration rarely satisfied the sweet tooth of the doughboy. Though everything in the confectionery line from peppermints to caramels was provided, lemon-drops were the soldier’s favorite. They were to the Yankee doughboy what gum-drops were to Doctor Cook’s Esquimaux. They devoured them at the rate of a hundred tons a month! At the beginning of the war it was found that most of the lemon-drops manufactured for the commercial market, being made of glucose and inferior or imitation fruit flavors, were not of good enough quality for the soldiers. So lemon-drops of the most expensive kind—the kind that they sell in the smart shops on Fifth Avenue and Tremont Street and Michigan Boulevard—were adopted as a standard, the recipes for making them being distributed to a number of candy manufacturers. Now the lemon-drops for the army are made from pure granulated sugar and flavored with an emulsion made from the rind of the lemon. The sourer they are the better, say the soldiers. So great became the demand for candy—which, by the way, is of great value in rebuilding wasted tissues—that the Chief Quartermaster of the A. E. F. took over a number of French candy factories and, using American sugar, manufactured huge quantities of candy for our troops in France.