Part 12

Tobacco was a recognized item in the ration of the A. E. F., statistics showing that 95 per cent of the men used it in one form or another—which serves to show how the soldier vote would go should the reformers ever attempt to saddle the Constitution with an antitobacco amendment. To men enduring great physical hardships, obliged to live without the comforts and frequently without the necessities of life, and always under the terrific strain imposed by war, tobacco fills a need which nothing else can satisfy. In view of this, it was decided to adopt the practice of our allies and allow each soldier a certain amount of tobacco a day, the ration being four cigarettes, four ounces of chewing-tobacco, or four ounces of smoking-tobacco, and one hundred papers. Though cigars were not included in the army ration, they could be purchased at the Quartermaster stores in France at astonishingly low prices. Havana cigars were sold at the same price which the government paid for them in Cuba, there being no tax or import duty, no charge for transportation, and no middleman’s profit. Smokers of cigars will appreciate how cheap they were when I mention that at the commissaries in France I paid eighteen cents apiece for Corona Coronas. In order to provide “smokes” for the army, the entire stocks of several of the largest cigarette and tobacco manufacturers were commandeered—a fact with which they quickly acquainted the public in their advertising. A single purchase consisted of 3,000,000,000 cigarettes—enough to provide two “fags” for approximately every human being on the globe. The difference between the old army and the new was strikingly illustrated by the difference in their choice of tobacco. The soldier of the old army was most strongly addicted to the use of that unlovely article known as “plug”—thereby giving steady employment to the spittoon-makers. The men of our new armies, however, expressed an overwhelming preference for the cigarette. Thus does tobacco gauge the progress of civilization!

A close third to tobacco and candy in the affections of the soldiers was chewing-gum. Three and a half million packages of the shop-girl’s delight were sent overseas during the month of January alone. Chewing-gum has come, indeed, to be regarded as little short of a necessity for the soldier, both because of its value as a substitute for water—it is estimated that 250 pounds of chewing-gum will save 100 gallons of water when it is needed most—and because it is a heat and energy producer. During intensive drilling, practice firing, and on marches the more gum a man chews the less water he drinks—obviously a highly important consideration, for at the front water is usually scarce and difficult to obtain. Curiously enough, the consumption of gum is heavier in winter than in summer, this doubtless being due, as I have already mentioned, to the fact that it is a heat-producer. It took the British, oddly enough, to devise a novel and interesting use for chewing-gum which was later adopted by certain of our own commanders. Just before an attack, when the assaulting battalions were formed up on the tapes waiting for the word which would send them over the top, the enemy’s scouts, prowling in No Man’s Land, frequently detected the presence of the waiting troops by their subdued chorus of coughing. A British officer who had been in the United States evolved the idea of stopping these betraying coughs by giving every man a stick of chewing-gum. So Messrs. Wrigley, Beeman, White, and Adams may congratulate themselves on having “done their bit” toward walloping the Hun.

My mention of a chorus of coughs naturally suggests the subject of music, which was another of the multitudinous activities of the Quartermaster Corps. By this I do not mean to imply that the “Q. M.” furnished the army with bands, for it did not, but it did supply the bands of the army with instruments and music. Music, you must understand, was one of the most important factors in the maintenance of that intangible something called morale. It was a curious characteristic of the American psychology that when a homesick soldier heard a band playing “Home, Sweet Home,” or “When You Come Back,” or “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” it did not increase his homesickness. It had, instead, precisely the opposite effect: it cheered him up! Recognizing this, the military authorities saw to it that bands were stationed in every town and hamlet in France where any considerable body of troops was billeted. By the last summer of the war we had in France nearly 400 bands, to say nothing of the musical organizations improvised by the various units. As a result, the French inhabitants of the zones in which our armies were operating became as familiar with “Over There,” “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-zip-zip,” and particularly with “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which was the soldier’s favorite because it so satisfyingly expressed his feelings, as they were with the “Marseillaise.” The American Army was, indeed, as noticeable for its musical proclivities as the French Army was for its total absence of them. Ours was a whistling, singing army, if ever there was one, though for some reason it seemed to delight in plaintive, melancholy tunes. Many and many a time I have heard a column coming down a road in the darkness, the softly whistled chorus of “The Long, Long Trail” rising above the clink of accoutrements and the _slog-slog-slog_ of marching feet.

In the early summer of 1918 the Quartermaster-General received a cable from General Pershing requesting that $50,000 worth of sheet-music for the bands of the A. E. F. be shipped without delay. As the chief of the purchasing unit, to whom the order was turned over, did not feel qualified to select the music for some 3,000,000 of his fighting countrymen, he delegated the task to a committee consisting of Lieutenant R. C. Deming, bandmaster at Camp Meigs, Mr. Ward Stephens, the noted organist and authority on music, and Irving Berlin, the most famous composer of popular music in America, who was at that time a sergeant in the Coast Guard but who was borrowed from that organization by the Quartermaster Corps. The selection and classification of this great mass of music—the largest single order of its kind ever given—necessitated the committee working almost night and day for weeks, it being enormously assisted in its task by the enthusiastic co-operation of the various music printers and publishers, both of these trades making great financial sacrifices in order to promote the pleasure and inspiration of the boys overseas.

Have you ever gone into one of those huge emporiums which make a specialty of supplying equipment for sportsmen, to purchase an outfit preparatory to a fishing-trip in Canada or a shooting expedition in the Rockies? If so, you will remember how much time and thought you devoted to comparing the merits of the various types of clothing and other equipment which you were shown. It probably took you the better part of an hour to decide whether you would be more comfortable wearing Canadian shoepacks or hobnailed ankle-boots. You had a long discussion with the salesman as to the relative merits of whipcord, Harris tweed, and gabardine. Even making the choice between a slouch hat and a cloth cap presented a perplexing problem. But this was only the beginning, for you had to decide on a rain-coat, a tent, a cot, blankets, pillows, cartridge-belts, fly-books, cooking utensils, and heaven knows what besides. And after you had made your final decision you were probably far from being satisfied with what you had selected. Yet this outfit, over which you had spent so much thought, was, probably, to be used only during a brief summer’s vacation. Picture, then, the task faced by the Quartermaster Corps when it was suddenly called upon to provide complete equipment for some 4,000,000 men for an indefinite period. At first thought it might seem easy enough to purchase clothing for soldiers—a coat, a pair of breeches, an overcoat, a hat, and a pair of shoes for each man—until you are reminded that no one of these simple articles of uniform was standard for civilian use, either in material, pattern, or color. Everything had to be made to order. Everything had, moreover, to be better made than if it were intended for civilian use, for the men for whom these articles were intended were not going out to shoot elk or catch trout; they were going to a country 3,000 miles away for the purpose of killing Germans, and no one could say how long the business would take them. It was a Titanic task, this equipping of the men who took up arms against Germany. The organization which handled the buying end of it was roughly as follows: in Washington the Clothing and Equipage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase, where all the activities were centralized; in Philadelphia a purchasing office, which was a branch of the great Quartermaster Depot in that city, and in New York a procurement office which kept constantly in touch with the raw-material markets of the world.

The innumerable special-service units which were constantly being added to the rapidly expanding army required all sorts of strange, new equipment and special clothing. The cooks and bakers had to have cotton aprons and the blacksmiths leather ones. The linemen of the telegraph battalions had to have special gloves. Hoods were needed for the motorcycle despatch-riders, overalls for the men of the stevedore battalions, helmets for the camp firemen, garments of fur and leather for the flying-men. The prisoners began to come streaming in and for them had to be designed clothing which would insure their speedy recognition and recapture in case they attempted to escape. The convalescents at the hospitals needed special suits. The expeditionary troops sent to Siberia and the Murman Coast required outfits which would keep them warm through the long arctic winters. And uniforms had to be provided for the army’s women nurses. Besides this vast quantity of clothing there were tents to be provided, cots, blankets, towels, shaving outfits, brown-canvas bags for filtering water, and the blue-denim bags in which the soldiers kept their personal belongings. These things were not in existence anywhere; they had to be made from the outset. To produce them in the enormous quantities required, not only took the maximum output of all the factories and mills already engaged in the manufacture of such articles, but hundreds of other plants had to change over their machinery in order to meet the army’s needs, and the Quartermaster Corps had to send experts to give instruction at these plants in the new manufacturing processes and methods. Nor was it enough for the Quartermaster Corps to thus become itself a manufacturer of clothing and equipment. It had to manufacture the cloth used in the clothing, and, going still further, it had to provide the raw cotton and wool used in making the cloth, as well as the hides for the leather used in the shoes. And it had to produce this staggering volume of equipment quickly, for the Germans would not wait. It was compelled, moreover, to make its purchases in a market glutted with orders from the Allied governments and from the domestic trade. And, to increase the difficulties under which the corps labored, it had to buy on credit, and to do so in the face of cash competition, for Congress did not make sufficient funds available until twelve weeks after the declaration of war. Nevertheless, the whole enormous undertaking was successfully carried through, and, save in rare instances, the soldiers never lacked for clothing or other Q. M. supplies.

Wool was the most important of the raw products to be procured, since it entered into the composition of more items than any other material. Soon after the declaration of war the Quartermaster Department estimated that about 100,000,000 pounds of scoured wool would be required to meet the initial demands of the army. An inventory of all wool supplies, including wool ordered from abroad as well as the stocks on hand in this country, revealed the startling fact that there was in sight only about 35,000,000 pounds—barely more than a third of the amount needed. To insure the procurement of this wool and to head off speculation in domestic wool prices, for the American sheep were then about to be sheared, the government itself, in July, 1917, entered the wool business. It immediately optioned practically all the wool in the hands of all the dealers in the United States; it fixed a price for the domestic supply for the ensuing year; it arranged to procure the entire 1917 clip if needed; it took over all wool under import licenses, and it sent its buyers to South America and the other foreign markets. There was a wool administrator to buy wool, a wool-purchasing quartermaster to pay for it, and a wool distributor to sell it to the government contractors. Within a year the Clothing and Equipage Division had absorbed the entire wool trade of the United States. In fact, there was no wool market again and no public sale of wool until after the signing of the Armistice.

The largest of the foreign markets which was available from the standpoint of accessibility was the Argentine. Australia and New Zealand were, of course, enormous markets, but the shortage of tonnage made it impossible to spare many bottoms for the long voyage to the antipodes. As a result of the shipping situation, when the fighting ceased there was an appalling shortage of wool everywhere in the world except in Australia and New Zealand. America was short of wool, there was a little in England, France had practically none, and in Germany and Austria there was none at all. But Australia and New Zealand had _a billion pounds_—and no ships.

At first the better grades of wool appeared to be adequate to meet the demands of the army, but later changes were made in the specifications for various cloths—uniform cloth being increased from 16 to 20 ounces, overcoating from 30 to 32 ounces, shirting flannel from 8½ to 9½ ounces, and blankets from 3 to 4 pounds—which made it necessary to utilize grades of wool which previously had been used only in coarse materials, such as carpet. In order to obtain the necessary weight and warmth, the lower grades of wool were blended with the higher grades, though this frequently entailed a sacrifice of fineness of texture and appearance. This explains why many of the uniforms worn by our returning soldiers looked rough and uneven in color. But the necessary cloth was provided and it was warm and it wore well. The trouble was that it was not provided soon enough. During the autumn of 1917 and the succeeding winter thousands of our soldiers, both in France and in the camps at home, did not have sufficient clothing to keep them dry or warm. Hundreds of American soldiers went into action wearing British uniforms—even to the buttons bearing the royal cipher and crown!

The Quartermaster Corps introduced endless economies in order to save wool. More economical patterns were made for uniforms. Originally 1.45 yards of cloth were required to make a pair of wool breeches. A cheaper cutting pattern reduced this figure to 1.222 yards, thus saving nearly a quarter of a yard of cloth on every pair. Since the purchases of wool breeches amounted to 10,300,000 pairs, this single economy resulted in a saving of over 2,300,000 yards of cloth on breeches alone. It was also found that cotton linings could be substituted for the wool facings of coats and overcoats without sacrificing either serviceability or warmth. Another important cloth economy came when the designers of the Clothing and Equipage Division eliminated the right-hand pocket of the “O. D.” shirt on the ground that this pocket was not used enough to justify the additional expense.

Americans have always believed, or pretended to believe, that, so far as the uniforms of our fighting forces are concerned, smartness is not essential. This is a mental attitude which we inherit, no doubt, from our pioneering forefathers, and which was strengthened by those Civil and Spanish War generals who tucked their trousers in their boots, pulled their slouch hats over their eyes, and wore handkerchiefs instead of collars. So, when the first contingents of the Expeditionary Forces set sail for France, we excused the obvious shortcomings of their uniforms by asserting that they “looked businesslike and American”—an assertion which was, however, open to some doubt. If our soldiers looked military—_and they did_—it was not because of their uniforms but in spite of them. No one recognized more quickly than the Commander-in-Chief of the A. E. F. that the uniform of the American soldier was lamentably lacking in smartness, a lack which was made painfully apparent when it was contrasted with those worn by the soldiers of the Allied nations. When, therefore, General Pershing recommended the adoption of a smarter-looking uniform, the Clothing and Equipage Division undertook to design one, with, incidentally, an eye to the saving of cloth. The coat of the uniform, formerly called the blouse—a ridiculous and inappropriate designation which is now obsolete—was cut with new lines which made it slimmer and more graceful while retaining all the warmth and comfort of the old garment. As the soldiers usually filled the patch-pockets of their old blouses with all sorts of articles they were usually unsightly bulges, but on the new coat the patch-pocket is retained only in appearance, the pocket actually being on the inside. It is not known to most Americans that the breeches which had been worn by American soldiers for twenty years or more have been replaced by trousers so far as the A. E. F. is concerned. The soldiers themselves were not particularly enamored of the breeches, which frequently caused chafing under the knee and always caused a burst of expletives when a man tried to put them on in a hurry. Moreover, it was often found impossible for the surgeons to remove breeches from a man wounded in the legs without cutting the cloth and thereby ruining the garment. All these objections have been obviated, however, by the adoption of trousers, which have the added value of increased warmth. Following General Pershing’s recommendations, the overcoat, which was much too long to be worn in the trenches, was redesigned, a new garment being evolved which was smarter and more practical. Other changes are the adoption of the spiral woollen puttee in place of the canvas legging and the substitution of the jaunty overseas cap for the impractical and universally unbecoming campaign hat.

The redesigning of the uniform—which, by the way, never appeared in the field—accomplished several surprising economies. Merely by the substitution of trousers for breeches, the lacings, eyelets, tape, and stays thus eliminated amounted to 95¼ cents on each garment, and had the war lasted until July 1, 1919, would have saved the taxpayer nearly $17,000,000 on orders placed or in sight. The change in the design of the overcoat saved 62 cents per garment—an estimated saving, by July 1, of nearly $900,000. It was found that the service coat could be made for $1.60 less than the old blouse, which by July 1 would have effected an economy of close to $5,000,000. The changes in these three garments not only gave the American soldier a much better-looking uniform but it saved the American Government enough money to build a first-class battleship, and, what was most important of all, it effected an enormous economy in the consumption of raw wool, which, once exhausted, could not be replaced with all the money on earth.

In making its earlier clothing contracts the government paid the contractor a percentage of the value of the yardage which he saved by his economy in cutting and it also permitted him to keep his own clippings. But later on, when the shortage in wool became more acute, the cloth issued to the contractor was calculated more closely, he received no credit for his savings, and all clippings had to be turned in. These clippings were sent to the base sorting-plant in New York, where they were baled and shipped to mills to be used as reworked wool, in blankets and other articles. From September, 1917, to December, 1918, this plant handled over 17,000,000 pounds of wool clippings, the total sales of which produced $5,500,000.

Wool was not only made up into clothing but it went into such knit goods as undershirts, drawers, stockings, gloves, and puttees. This branch of the war woollen-goods industry found itself confronted with a serious problem in the lack of suitable machinery, for though there were numerous manufacturers of knit goods, their mills had been devoted to the production of specialties, such as men’s union suits and women’s underwear. These concerns had, therefore, to make great changes in their machinery, and sometimes to remodel their plants, before they could knit underclothing in the sizes required for the army. Toward the close of the war every machine in the United States that could make hosiery was knitting socks for soldiers.

At one time there was a serious shortage of needles, which we had formerly obtained from Germany. When this source of supply was cut off we turned to Japan, but the Japanese needles proved anything but satisfactory: they were not properly tempered and their frequent breakage caused much loss and delay. A rumor reached the ears of the Quartermaster-General that there were 10,000,000 knitting-needles in Sweden, whereupon purchasing agents were despatched to Scandinavia post-haste. They returned a few weeks later bringing with them a million needles, which helped to relieve the situation, the American needle-makers meanwhile being pushed to the limit.

Though the production of the regulation service uniform constituted the bulk of the Manufacturing Branch’s activities, it was by no means the whole of them. It went into an entirely new field, for example, when it bought uniforms for the women nurses of the army. There was a trim little Norfolk suit of navy blue which cost the government about thirty dollars; a cotton uniform for indoor wear that cost three dollars; a long, belted ulster costing in the neighborhood of twenty-eight dollars; to say nothing of blouses made from navy-blue silk, jaunty hats of blue velour, stout tan walking-boots, and hospital shoes of white canvas. When it came to lingerie, however, the “Q. M.” balked. It permitted the nurses to purchase that for themselves.

Then there was the special clothing required for the soldiers fighting on the Siberian steppes and the frozen wastes around Archangel. These garments were designed by men who had had experience in the arctic and were intimately familiar with the peculiar conditions existing on the world’s remotest battle-line. Our soldiers in Russia were supplied with caps and mittens made from muskrat fur, overcoats of moleskin or of duck lined with sheepskin, Alaskan parkas with hoods lined with the fur of the wolf, woodsmen’s heavy knee-length socks, Canadian shoepacks, such as the trappers and _voyageurs_ wear in the Northern woods, and special heavy underwear. These outfits, which cost about a hundred dollars each, were supplied to approximately 15,000 men.