Part 14

As soon as it became apparent that it would be necessary for the government to make large purchases of horses and mules, hundreds of horse-breeders, racing and hunting men and polo-players offered their services as purchasing agents. Some fifty of these gentlemen, as shrewd judges of horse-flesh as the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, the hunting-fields of Long Island and Virginia, and the show-rings and race-courses of the great cities could produce, were given commissions as captains in the Quartermaster Corps, and were sent to the headquarters of the various purchasing zones for a short period of practical instruction in the type of horse required by the army, and in army methods generally, before being sent on the road to purchase animals. How efficiently and conscientiously these officers, unaccustomed to military methods, performed their duties is shown by the exceptionally high class of animals which they purchased and shipped to the various auxiliary remount depots, where they were trained and conditioned for army use. As the dearth of tonnage placed a limit on the number of animals which could be shipped overseas, a number of remount officers were sent to Europe, where large purchases of live stock were made, about 110,000 horses and 10,000 mules being bought from the French, some 12,000 horses and 6,000 mules from the British, and upward of 12,000 mules—the big, 16-hand Andalusians—in Spain.

At the beginning of the war there were only three remount depots in the United States—at Front Royal, Virginia, Fort Keogh, Montana, and Fort Reno, Oklahoma—together with auxiliary depots at Fort Bliss and Fort Sam Houston in Texas, but with the rapid expansion of the forces it was found necessary to establish an auxiliary remount depot adjacent to each of the thirty-three camps and cantonments of the National Guard and the National Army. This naturally necessitated an enormous increase in the Remount Service personnel, which shortly before the Armistice numbered 400 officers and 19,000 enlisted men. As the war progressed it became increasingly difficult for the Remount Service to meet the demands made by the auxiliary depots for officers, for the available supply of amateur horsemen who had volunteered their services quickly became exhausted, many of them going into other branches of the army. In order to meet this demand camps were organized at Camp Joseph E. Johnston, near Jacksonville, Florida, and at Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where enlisted men who possessed the necessary qualifications were trained for commissions as officers. There was also established at Camp Johnston a mobilization camp for the organization and training of Field Remount Depots, but as this organization did not prove sufficiently flexible, there was authorized a smaller unit, known as a Field Remount Squadron, consisting of 6 officers and 157 enlisted men, it being estimated that one squadron would be required for every replacement of 400 animals. And replacements were, of necessity, frequent, it having been estimated that the average life of a horse in France was only sixteen days. There were organized at Camp Johnston a total of sixty-three Field Remount Squadrons, three wagon companies, and twelve pack-trains, of which all but seventeen squadrons saw service abroad. The enlisted personnel of these squadrons consisted of drafted men who were carefully selected because of their knowledge of horses, most of them having been farmers, ranchmen, cow-punchers, and, in a few cases, jockeys. Provision was also made for training the enlisted specialists attached to each squadron, schools being established for horse-shoers, saddlers, farriers, teamsters, and squadron clerks. Indeed, there was no more interesting sight at a cantonment than the Remount Depot, where bronco-busters, fresh from the ranges, could be seen breaking unruly horses in the “bull-pens,” while veteran packers and plainsmen gave instruction to classes of raw recruits in the art of harnessing and driving a six-horse “swing” or of throwing the “diamond hitch.”

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The chief function of the Quartermaster Corps might be described, I suppose, as spending. It was, in fact, barring the Ordnance Department, the greatest spending agency in America, if not in the world, during the war. Not many persons are aware, however, I imagine, that it has a division whose sole purpose is saving. I refer to the Salvage Division. This was the only organization in the army which turned waste into profit. It was a ragpicker, a garbage-collector, a junk-dealer, and an ole-clothes man combined. While certain departments of the government seized on the great emergency to spend money like a drunken sailor, as the politicians put it, the Salvage Service was as systematic a saver as the late Russell Sage. And, like that famous financier, it was able to show something for its savings—to be exact, something over $100,000,000. It had a perfect passion for economy. It saved everything, from the pieces clipped from a soldier’s overcoat when it was shortened to the food which he left on his plate. Nothing was too large or too small to escape it. Indeed, the members of the Salvage Service should have adopted for their shoulder-badge a design showing an ever-open eye. If a locomotive was utterly demolished in a railway wreck the men of the Salvage Service appeared on the scene almost before the wheels had stopped turning and collected the splintered remnants. If a soldier tossed a pair of worn-out socks into the garbage-barrel, the Salvage Service fished them out and used them for something or other. In France it saved and sorted the millions of sand-bags which lined the parapets of the trenches; it untangled and rerolled for future use the millions of feet of twisted, rusted barbed wire which formed the entanglements in front of the trenches; it gathered and sorted and sent back for reloading the empty shells from the field-guns; it fumigated and cleaned and pressed the soldiers’ uniforms; it washed their shirts and socks and underwear; it mended their shoes; it transformed their obsolete campaign hats into felt slippers, and both in this country and abroad it collected the waste from the mess-tables as well as introducing various methods of food-saving; it operated hundreds of camp and mobile laundries, where for a dollar a month a soldier could have washed all the clothing he wished; it ran farms and truck-gardens at the camps and cantonments in order to supply the troops with fresh vegetables; it maintained printing-shops, wagon-repair shops, carpentry-shops, and paint-shops, and just as the Treasury Department appealed to the country to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” so the Salvage Service, by means of posters and placards, appealed to the army to “Save! Save! Save!”

In the happy, careless, easy-going days before the war, the question of repairing the worn shoes and clothing of the soldiers was not considered of sufficient importance to merit even passing attention from the War Department. The army was small, material was plentiful, and the clothing belonged to the soldier. The government issued a man a uniform and out of his pay required him to keep it clean and in repair; if his clothing did not present a neat appearance, he received a reprimand or a court martial. When his shoes wore out he had to have them mended at his own expense—all out of the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a month! But under the new system, introduced at the beginning of the war, the soldier’s clothing is the property of the government, and the government undertakes to keep it clean and in repair. And that is where the work of the Salvage Service comes in.

[Illustration: AMERICAN SALVAGE DUMP IN FRANCE.

“The salvage service had a perfect passion for economy.”]

[Illustration: A WORKROOM IN AN AMERICAN SALVAGE DEPOT IN FRANCE.

The salvage service fumigated, cleaned, pressed the soldiers’ uniforms, washed their shirts, socks, and underwear. It mended shoes and transformed campaign hats into felt slippers.

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

[Illustration: AN AMERICAN DELOUSING STATION.

The weary men returning from the trenches found the delousing and fumigating stations set up and awaiting them.]

[Illustration: AN AMERICAN LAUNDRY IN OPERATION NEAR THE FRONT.

Each of these units can wash the clothing of 10,000 men, fresh from the trenches, weekly.

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

Within five months after its entry into the war the United States, profiting by the experience of the Allies, took steps toward the organization of a branch of the army which would devote itself to the conservation and reclamation of articles and materials which would otherwise be wasted. Pursuant to this policy there was established in October, 1917, the Conservation Branch of the Supplies Division of the Quartermaster-General’s Office with a personnel of two officers and a stenographer. Within less than a year this little nucleus had expanded into the huge Salvage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, with 500 officers, 20,000 enlisted men, and 2,000 civilian employees. The work of this division has consisted, generally speaking, in cleaning, laundering, repairing, renovating, and otherwise looking after the uniform and equipment of the American soldier, and in those cases where the uniform or equipment was too badly damaged to be worth repairing, the service has devised means of using the sound material for other purposes. During the six months beginning April 1, 1918, the service salvaged nearly 9,250,000 articles of clothing and equipment. The value of these articles when new was something over $41,000,000. After their repair it is estimated that their value was in the neighborhood of $29,000,000. The total cost of repair was a little more than $2,500,000, leaving a net saving due to this salvage operation of about $23,500,000. Quite a tidy sum. During four months of 1918 the Salvage Service collected approximately 43,000,000 pounds of junk, including old metals, iron, rubber, cotton and woollen rags, rope, paper, leather, and horsehair. About 3,000,000 pounds of this material, having an estimated value of $769,000, was reissued for army use, while 19,000,000 pounds was sold for $508,000, leaving 23,000,000 pounds still to be disposed of. Had it not been for the Salvage Service, practically all this would have gone to waste. In addition this division collected a great quantity of lumber, mostly odds and ends, of which $25,000 worth was reissued for army use and $475,000 worth was sold, leaving approximately 1,750,000 board feet on hand. From May to November, 1918, the Salvage Division collected and sold $300,000 worth of garbage, and nearly $200,000 worth of manure and condemned hay and straw, to say nothing of dead animals to the value of $5,000, thus netting upward of $500,000 from the swill-pail, the manure-pile, and the bone-yard alone! The American soldier likes to sit down to his meals with a heaping plate before him, and as he rarely eats everything on his plate, an enormous amount of perfectly good material finds its way to the garbage-barrel. It is estimated that prior to July, 1918, every man in the camps in the United States wasted approximately two pounds of food per day in this fashion. Then the machinery of the Salvage Service was set in operation, it being estimated that in five months, on the basis of 1,000,000 men, it saved _nearly a quarter of a billion pounds of foodstuffs_.

Another activity of the Salvage Corps was the operation of hundreds of camp and mobile laundries. When war was declared the government owned fourteen small steam-laundries which provided for the needs of the few hundred men stationed at the posts where they were located. But with the declaration of war and the concentration of hundreds of thousands of men in the various cantonments, the laundry question assumed such serious proportions that nineteen cantonment laundries were hastily erected and placed in operation. The urgent need for these laundries is illustrated by the fact that on September 1, 1918, nearly 6,000,000 pieces of clothing were awaiting laundering. Quite a wash-basket, wasn’t it?

The Mobile Laundry Unit was one of the novelties introduced by the Great War. Instead of the soldiers being compelled to take their soiled clothing to the laundry, the laundry came to them. No matter how remote the town in which their rest billets might be located, no matter how exposed it might be to the fire of the enemy’s long-range guns, the weary men, returning from the trenches, found the mobile laundry set up and awaiting them. Each unit consists of a large steam-tractor and four trailers. When erected for operation the trailers form a room thirty feet long and twenty-eight feet wide, with power provided from outside by the tractor. The trailers contain two large washing-machines, two extractors, a drying tumbler, hot and cold water tanks, a pump to lift water from wells and streams, a soap-tank, and a dynamo for electric lighting. Each of these units, by operating twenty-four hours a day, can wash the clothing of ten thousand men, fresh from the trenches, weekly. So rapidly and systematically was the work done that when the men left the “wash-up” and “delousing” stations, after having rid themselves of the filth and vermin acquired at the front, they found clean clothing awaiting them. And clean clothing—and this I say from experience—means more to the soldier than anything save a bath and food.

The Salvage Service has been one of the least advertised, as it has been one of the most efficient, branches of the army. Probably not one out of a thousand readers of this book was previously aware of its existence. Yet during the twelve months of 1918 it saved to the government, either in articles repaired and reissued or in materials saved and sold, _one hundred and one millions of dollars_. (If this does not impress you, let me remind you that the entire appropriation for the support of the army for 1898—the year of the Spanish-American War—was only a little over $70,000,000.) It has developed what was formerly a liability into a tremendous asset. It has conserved untold quantities of raw materials at a time when those materials were most vitally needed and were most difficult to obtain. By again and again repairing and using worn-out clothing and equipment and thereby permitting the shipment of vital necessities, it saved thousands of tons of shipping at a time when every ton counted.

If, in this impressionistic sketch of the activities of the Salvage Service, and of its parent, the Quartermaster Corps, I seem to have indulged too freely in the use of figures, it is because those figures are of vital concern to _you_. They represent _your_ dollars, Mr. Reader; they show where the money from _your_ Liberty Bonds has gone.

V

ORDNANCE

The history of mankind is punctuated by a few examples of endeavor which, by reason of their magnitude, cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind. That phase of America’s part in the Great War comprised in the work of the Ordnance Department of the Army is one of them. It has been termed, and without exaggeration, the greatest effort, directed by a single head, of all time. It was incomparably the greatest industrial undertaking that the world has ever seen. Therein lies the difficulty of writing an adequate story of ordnance—it is too big, too complex, for any writer entirely to grasp, for any reader completely to comprehend. It is like attempting to describe the grandeur of the Grand Canyon; so stupendous a thing can neither be translated into words nor encompassed by the mind. The best that I can hope to do is to sketch a few of the most salient features of the great story in barest outline.

First of all, I would wish to convey to you some conception of the vastness of the organization commonly referred to as Army Ordnance, the immensity of the sums which it expended, and the enormous quantities in which it dealt. It has been said that a billion is too huge a figure for any one to comprehend. Scarcely a billion minutes have elapsed since the birth of Christ. Yet the estimated cost of the ordnance required to supply our first 5,000,000 men was nearly _thirteen billions of dollars_. But that is, after all, merely an endless caravan of ciphers. Here is another way of expressing it. Between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the declaration of war against Germany, the sixty-four successive congresses of the United States appropriated but twenty-six billion dollars for every purpose of government, including the cost of five wars, the pensions resulting from those wars, the upkeep of the Army and Navy, the activities of the State, Interior, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Post-Office Departments, the control of immigration, the administration of justice, river and harbor improvements, public buildings and public works of every description, the salary of every government employee from the President of the United States to the keeper of an obscure lighthouse in the Philippines, these countless items representing in the aggregate the total expenditures, over a period of more than seven-score years, of the richest nation in the world. Thus it will be seen that, had the war continued for another five months, a single branch of the army would have expended approximately one-half as much as the nation expended from its foundation to the date on which it entered the great conflict. Combine the wealth of all of America’s millionaires, add the value of all of America’s railways, throw in the Standard Oil, the Western Union, the Ford Motor Company, and the United States Steel Corporation for good measure, and you will still fall far short of the staggering total which the United States had planned to invest in ordnance. Or, if these comparisons are not sufficiently graphic, the Ordnance Department would have spent enough in the first two years of war to have built twenty-four Panama Canals, to have purchased the entire city of New York, at its assessed valuation, twice over, or to have built 36,000,000 Ford cars—one for every third person in the United States. That is the best that I can do to give you a realization of the immensity of the task assigned to the Ordnance Department.

Ordnance! No word in the whole lexicon of war held so much significance for the fighters at the front—and so little for civilians at home. For ordnance is the bed-plate of the whole military machine. If it breaks or gives way the machine instantly stops running. An army can fight without cavalry, without aircraft, without tanks, without machine-guns, yes, even without artillery, but no army can fight, or ever has fought, without ordnance. It is as essential to the functioning of an army as oil is to the burning of a lamp. Behind the belching _soixante-quinze_, behind the crackling musketry, behind the lumbering, elephantine tanks, behind the _escadrilles_ of airplanes, was the huge organization, its head on the Potomac and its tentacles reaching westward to the Pacific and eastward to the Rhine, which provided the fighting-men with weapons and kept the voracious maws of those weapons supplied with their steel food. The combat troops up on the line knew that should the great Ordnance machine break down, even for an hour, they would be compelled to retreat or surrender. The generals knew it. The statesmen and politicians in Paris knew it, too. And the Germans knew it best of all, as is testified to by the labor troubles which they fomented and the fires and explosions which they caused. You didn’t know that the work of the Ordnance Department was so important, eh? Yet, if I remember rightly, you were always asking why the Allies didn’t end the war by destroying a certain German ordnance establishment called Krupps.

What is ordnance? It were easier to tell what it is not. It is artillery of all types and calibres, with mounts, carriages, and ammunition; small arms of every description; every kind of explosive used in warfare; an endless variety of gas-driven, steam-driven, horse-drawn, and hand-drawn transport; all harness and horse equipment, save that used by the Quartermaster Corps; tools, machinery, and material for making or repairing everything included in the term—in short, every tool used in the fighter’s trade.

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Dawn on the Western Front. Everything is in readiness for a great infantry attack. For weeks past the preparations have been in progress. The roads leading to the front have been ground to powder by the endless processions of heavy-laden motor-lorries bringing up food, ammunition, and supplies. The advanced dumps are piled high with cases of rifle and machine-gun cartridges, trench-mortar ammunition, shell of every calibre and kind, all stencilled with the flaming bomb which is the trade-mark of the Army Ordnance. Up in the forward observation-posts intelligence officers are peering anxiously through periscopes into the fog-hung wastes of No Man’s Land. In the assembly trenches the storm troops are waiting in silence on the tapes which mark the positions of the various units, the faces of the men showing grim and determined under their steel helmets. Each wears a belt containing a hundred cartridges in clips; his bayonet is fixed. The men of the medical detachments, distinguished by the broad-bladed bolos at their hips, lean against their up-ended stretchers, waiting for the beginning of the bloody business which will stain those stretchers red. The officers, a trifle nervous and self-conscious, stroll up and down the ranks, examining their automatics or glancing at the luminous dials of their wrist-watches to note the approach of the zero hour. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, bolos, periscopes, cartridges, together with the clips which hold them and the belts in which they are carried—all are ordnance.