Part 4

Owing to the difficulty of constructing in France enough telegraph and telephone lines to meet the constantly increasing requirements of the American Expeditionary Forces, as well as to relieve the great congestion which prevailed on all of the existing lines, the scientists of the Signal Corps turned their attention early in the war to the possibility of sending several messages simultaneously over a single wire. Without entering into the details of the long series of experiments which were conducted by the Signal Corps, in conjunction with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company at Camp Alfred Vail, New Jersey, or attempting to describe in terms which would be intelligible to the non-technical reader the device which was finally perfected, it may be said that the result is accomplished through the application of radio, the wire serving as a guide for the radio currents and conducting them with a minimum of power and with a minimum of interference with other radio communications. This device has now been brought to such a state of perfection that eight telegraph messages and eleven telephone messages can be carried over a single wire at the same time, the Morse messages being transmitted by means of the multiplex telegraph apparatus—a system which was discovered as early as 1910 and is now in general use by the large telegraph companies—while the telephone conversations are guided by wireless waves, which serve as carriers for the voice currents. By placing on ordinary telegraph-wires wireless waves of very short length or of very great frequency, officers of the Signal Corps have successfully conversed over a line from Washington to Baltimore which was being used at the same time for the transmission of duplex telegraph messages. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the performance was its extreme simplicity, the feat being accomplished merely by placing on the line, through proper connecting condensers, a pair of radiotelephone sets such as are used for communicating between ground-stations and airplanes. Whereas it was believed, until very recently, that it was impracticable to hold more than four wired-wireless conversations over one wire or one pair of wires, in addition to whatever ordinary telephone or telegraph conversation might be on that wire, the Signal Corps has now demonstrated that it is not only possible but entirely practicable to hold ten or more extra telephone conversations without their interfering with each other. Had this system been perfected while the war was in progress it would have meant that ten telephone and two or more telegraph conversations could have been carried on simultaneously with a point served only by a single wire. In other words, by the application of this system one wire will take the place of ten.

Another phase of science uncovered by the Signal Corps which figuratively makes the mind of the layman stand still and gasp is the discovery, due to the experiments of the Chief Signal Officer, General Squier, that trees can be used as instruments in the receipt and transmission of electrical messages, both telegraph and telephone, both by wire and wireless. Think of it, my friends! The commonplace tree possesses those very qualities that men have spent centuries of effort to embody in a frail spider’s web of wire!

“From the moment an acorn is planted in fertile soil,” to quote the words of General Squier himself, “it becomes a ‘detector’ and a ‘receiver’ of electromagnetic waves, and the marvellous properties of this receiver, through agencies at present entirely unknown to us, are such as to vitalize the acorn and to produce in time the giant oak. In the power of multiplying plant-cells it may, indeed, be called an incomparable ‘amplifier.’ From this angle of view we may consider that trees have been pieces of electrical apparatus from their beginning, and with their manifold chains of living cells are absorbers, conductors, and radiators of the long electromagnetic waves as used in the radio art. For our present purpose we may consider, therefore, a growing tree as a highly organized piece of living earth, to be used in the same manner as we now use the earth as a universal conductor for telephony and telegraphy and other electrical purposes.”

Not only have telephone conversations, in which the voice is transmitted just as clearly as by the ordinary metallic circuit telephone, been carried on from tree to tree, up to a distance of three miles, in the outskirts of Washington, but while the war was still in progress the signal officers, using tree-tops as antennæ, read messages from ships at sea, from aviators in the sky, and from the great radio-stations in South America and Europe. As a result of this discovery, the lofty and costly towers which are now used for the sending and receipt of radio messages will no longer be a necessity. All that will be necessary is to drive a spike in a tree, attach a wire to the spike, and run the wire to a radio apparatus, whereupon messages can be received and sent, the distance covered depending upon the power of the instrument. The tree telegraph has been dubbed by General Squier a “floragraph” and the tree telephone a “floraphone,” while the messages transmitted over this arboreal system are to be known as “floragrams.” Though this discovery will in all likelihood result in an amazing expansion of the world’s system of communication, and though it will give radio-towers, thousands of them, in fact, to every village and to every farm, it does not necessarily mean that every man who possesses a vine and fig-tree will be able to sit on his front porch and gossip with his neighbors.

During the war the offices of the Chief Signal Officer were literally besieged by persons who claimed to have invented various systems of message transmission which could not be tapped, or which, if they were tapped, could not be understood. It was perfectly well known to us, of course, that the German Listening-In Service, particularly in the front-line trenches, was well organized and extremely efficient, and that telephone and buzzer conversations held over our wires were frequently intercepted. It was known, moreover, that Germany had spies, both in France and the United States, whose sole duty it was to tap the governmental telephone and telegraph systems for the purpose of obtaining military information. Scores of devices designed to secure the inviolability of the vitally important messages which were constantly passing over the wires were submitted to the Signal Corps. Anxious as they were to obtain a system of message transmission which could jeer at the efforts of the enemy’s spies, the experts of the Signal Corps steadily maintained that such a thing did not exist, for, as they said with truth, if an instrument could be devised which could transmit and decode a message, there was no reason why the Germans could not in time manufacture one like it, put it on the line, and thus obtain the information desired.

One of the inventors who approached the Signal Corps asserted that, though he did not claim to have a device which would render a message indecipherable, he had a system which made it impossible for an enemy agent to tap the wire over which messages were being transmitted without the sender and receiver being instantly notified that some one was eavesdropping upon them, whereupon their conversation would, of course, cease. “Prove it to us,” said the Signal Corps, and provided the inventor with an opportunity to demonstrate his system over a miniature line. Without the slightest difficulty the military experts tapped the line and, with the aid of a stenographer, recorded every message which was sent over it, the quantity of energy which they withdrew for the purpose being so minute that the delicate detectors failed to record the fact that the line had been tampered with.

Another system had as its basic principle the breaking up of the groups of Morse dots and dashes which represented the letters of the message, and routing these mangled fragments over widely separated wires to the receiving-station, where they were automatically joined together again so as to form the message as originally sent. If, for example, it was desired to send from Hoboken to Washington the message “_Transport Leviathan sails June twenty-fifth_,” it was proposed to make use of two lines, one running, let us say, through Harrisburg, the other via Wilmington. The message sent over the Harrisburg wire would be broken up something after this fashion: “t-a-s-o-t-e-i-t-a-s-i-s-u-e-w-n-y-i-t,” while the portion going by way of Wilmington would read: “r-n-p-r-l-v-a-h-n-a-l-j-n-t-e-t-f-f-h.” To create still further confusion in the mind of any one who might succeed in intercepting one of these sets of fragments, it was proposed to superimpose a “camouflage” message upon the disconnected letters, the characters of the camouflage message to occupy the spaces between the characters of the real message. By an exceedingly ingenious device, these apparently inextricably intermixed and unrelated letters were automatically sorted out at the receiving-station and pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle, so that the message appeared precisely as it was sent. Going a step further, the inventors of this system proposed by the same means to install a system of telephone communication whereby the spoken words would be broken up just as the Morse characters were divided, certain sounds in each word going over one wire and the remaining sounds over another, to be joined together at the receiving-station into a perfectly intelligible conversation. Here again a wholly separate and extraneous conversation was superimposed over the sounds proceeding by each route, so that were either of the lines tapped the listener-in would be rewarded for his pains by hearing a torrent of sound which would convince him that he was listening to a combination of Choctaw, Chinese, the ravings of John McCullough, and the symptoms of a severe cold. Notwithstanding the undeniable ingenuity of this system, the Signal Corps experts demonstrated, to the unconcealed astonishment of the inventors, that they could overhear and understand these crazy-quilt conversations as readily as though they were being held across a dinner-table in plain English.

Early in 1918, however, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, becoming interested in the solution of this apparently insoluble problem, produced a device whereby a message could be transmitted over a wire in such a form that it was absolutely indecipherable to any one save the person for whom it was intended. As originally developed, this system was unable to do all that was claimed for it, but, thanks to the co-operation of the Signal Corps, there was finally produced an electrical device which will transform an ordinary message into cipher, transmit it with absolute secrecy, and decode it at the other end—all at the rate of from forty to seventy words a minute. This may be said to be the only cipher in existence which is absolutely indecipherable and at the same time practicable. As universal peace is not yet within sight, even with the aid of a telescope, and as this invention would prove of incalculable value to the United States in the event of our again becoming involved in war, it is obviously out of the question to discuss the principle on which it is based, much less the details of its construction and operation. It is enough to say that this nation is now the possessor of a system of code transmission which can defy all the experts in the world, a message sent by its means being absolutely indecipherable to the inventor himself.

Though before the signing of the Armistice this device was operating between several points in the United States with complete satisfaction, the apparatus could not be manufactured in time to permit of its use overseas before the end of the war. The engineers of the Signal Corps assert that this device will eventually be perfected to a degree of commercial practicability which will make it possible to transmit cipher messages over cables as well as land lines without the necessity of manual transmission and without the use of a recorder. As the machine codes and decodes messages automatically, the large code-room forces which were used in Washington during the war, and which are employed by many of the great banking and commercial institutions, would no longer be required, thus doing away entirely with the labor at present involved in coding and decoding messages and cutting down the time required for their transmission by many hours.

II

“ESSAYONS”

If, the next time you meet an officer of Engineers, you will observe his uniform closely, you will perceive that the buttons of his tunic, instead of being embossed with the arms of the United States, like all other branches of the service, bear a device consisting of an eagle, a castle, a rising sun, and the motto “_Essayons_.” Like the bow of black velvet, called a “flash,” which the Royal Welsh Fusiliers have sewn at the back of their collars to commemorate the fact that they were the last regiment in the British Army to wear the pigtail, so the buttons of the Engineers serve to remind their wearers that the famous organization is as old as the nation, tracing its history back to the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers of the Continental Army.

“_Essayons_”—“Let us try.” One likes the quiet confidence of the motto.

“Can you make roads for my guns through the swamps of the Wilderness?” asked Grant.

“Let us try,” replied the Engineers—and the roads were built.

“Can you build docks for disembarking ten thousand men a day and railways to carry those men to the front?” asked Pershing.

“Let us try,” the Engineers responded—and almost overnight miles of docks and networks of rails appeared as though at the wave of a magician’s wand.

“Can you locate the enemy’s guns by their sound? Can you keep our troops supplied with water? Can you print maps? Can you make dugouts? Can you operate search-lights? Can you dredge harbors for the entrance of our transports? Can you build highways and keep them in repair? Can you quarry the stone for those highways? Can you cut a million feet of lumber a day? Can you design better types of armored cars, sound-detectors, mobile cranes, portable sawmills, listening apparatus, mapping cameras, steel bridges, barbed-wire entanglements, than any in existence? And, if the necessity arises, can you fight?”

“_Essayons_,” answered the Engineers—whereupon all these things were done.

Whenever the army has had work to be done which no one else knew how to do, they have sent for the Engineers. Who designed, built, and operated our tanks before the organization of the Tank Corps? The Engineers. Who organized the Gas and Flame Regiment? The Engineers. The Camouflage Corps? The Engineers, of course. Who did the mining, quarrying, timber-cutting, well-driving, dock, bridge, road, railway, and camp building for our armies overseas? Again, the Engineers. Indeed, I doubt if any organization of any army in the Great War can show such a record of varied activities and successful accomplishments as the Corps of Engineers. One can say of the American Engineer, as Kipling said of the British Marine:

“There isn’t a job on the top o’ the earth the beggar don’t know nor do— You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead to paddle ’is own canoe; ... They think for ’emselves, an’ they steal for ’emselves, an’ they never ask what’s to do, But they’re camped an’ fed, an’ they’re up an’ fed, before our bugle’s blew.”

The immense importance attached to the work of the Engineers is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, whereas the army was increased to 19½ times its pre-war size, the enormous problems of field fortification, construction, and transportation, both with and behind the fighting forces, as well as the direction of many entirely new phases of warfare, necessitated an increase of the Corps of Engineers to 131½ times its strength at the beginning of the war. Prior to July, 1916, the corps consisted of only three battalions, with a total strength of not over 1,900 men, but when the Armistice was signed there had been organized, or were in process of organization, 500 Engineer units, with a strength of some 312,000 men, or more than 10 per cent of the entire army.

Now it must be kept in mind that in the original corps of pre-war days the men were trained only as sappers and not in the countless specialist branches which were developed by the great conflict. The fundamental use of sapper troops is, theoretically, at least, the supervision of technical work during tactical operations. One regiment of sappers is normally assigned to each division, is under the immediate command of the divisional commander, and operates as directed by him. To this regiment is given the work of organizing positions for defense, which includes the construction of trenches, gun-positions, ammunition-dumps, and dugouts, the repair and maintenance of roads in the divisional area, the construction of shelters where required, and the general direction of the work necessary to keep open the lines of communication and supply. In open warfare it is customary for the divisional commander to hold his sapper regiment in reserve to be used for applying the decisive pressure or resistance at the moment when it is most needed. When going forward with the infantry, sapper troops usually have a definite technical mission, such as the organization of captured ground, the destruction of obstacles and the bridging of streams. During a retreat they are attached to the rear-guard, being charged with the demolition of bridges, the obstruction of roads, and the cutting of railway communications. Though the ranks of the Engineers were filled, for the most part, with men who were experts and specialists in certain trades and professions, they were time after time thrown into the line as combat troops, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the infantry. On more than one occasion they showed that, destitute of combat training though many of them were, they could handle a rifle or a machine-gun as well as an axe or a spade. At Cambrai the 11th (railway) Engineers, caught in the German counter-push, offered a stubborn and heroic resistance against overwhelming numbers. At Amiens another railway regiment, the 11th Engineers, formed a part of the little force with which General Sandeman Carey blocked the gap in the British line and thereby prevented the Germans from breaking through to the Channel ports. For its behavior on that occasion the regiment was cited by the British and its commander was decorated. Perhaps you were not aware that two companies of Engineers fought alongside the Marines in the Bois de Belleau. And, when the gray hordes of Hindenburg were reeling back from the Marne, a report from the Rainbow Division ended: “Our advance troops, the 117th Engineers, are pressing the enemy closely.” But the story that will live longest in the annals of the famous corps is that of the sergeant of the railway regiment at Cambrai, who, surrounded by the enemy, refused to surrender and defended himself with his only weapon, a crowbar. When they found him, hours later, the crowbar was still clutched in his dead hand. About him, with crushed skulls, lay seven Germans.

The innumerable new devices produced by the Great War, however, required for their operation great numbers of specially trained men, so that the Corps of Engineers, from an organization consisting solely of sapper troops, found itself called upon to do more and more work in almost every branch of engineering. To meet these demands men were accordingly trained as specialists and assigned to specialist regiments and battalions, so that, when the war ended, the Corps of Engineers consisted of camouflage, car-repair, crane-operator, dock-construction, dredging, electrical and mechanical, forestry, general-construction, highway, inland-waterway, light-railway construction, shop, and operation, locomotive-repair, military-mapping, mining, pontoon park and train, quarry, railway-transportation, road, sapper, search-light (including antiaircraft), sound-and-flash-ranging, standard-gauge railway-construction, operation, shop and maintenance-of-way, supply, surveying and printing, trades and storekeepers, transportation and water-supply troops, organized as needed into companies, battalions, or regiments.

Now it was realized, from the very beginning, that the success of our armies in France would depend upon transportation. And, thanks to the threats of Pancho Villa, we had at least the framework of a transportation organization, for when it became necessary to send troops to the Mexican border in 1916, the War Department had organized a transportation service of sorts and had placed Samuel M. Felton, president of the Chicago Great Western Railway, at the head of it. Thus it came about that upon our entrance into the Great War there devolved upon Mr. Felton and his staff the gigantic task of obtaining in the United States and shipping to Europe the enormous quantity of transportation equipment and supplies required for the use of our forces overseas. In order to ascertain just what was required in equipment and supplies, a commission, headed by Colonel William Barclay Parsons, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Colonel (then Major) W. J. Wilgus, formerly vice-president of the New York Central system, was sent to Europe within less than thirty days after the declaration of war. Upon the completion of its preliminary survey of the situation the commission dispersed, leaving Colonel Wilgus as the sole nucleus of the American Transportation Service in France, with Captain L. A. Jenney, formerly chief draftsman of the New York Central, as his assistant. Sitting on soap-boxes in an office in the Boulevard Haussman in Paris, with packing-cases for desks, these two officers outlined the general policy with respect to military transportation for the A. E. F. which the conditions seemed to warrant, and which General Pershing later adopted, and drew up the first requisition for railway and port equipment, materials, and tools. Colonel Wilgus, himself a veteran railroad man, quickly realized the vastness of the problem which confronted us and the gravity of the situation resulting from the dilapidated condition of the French railways and the appalling shortage of French rolling-stock. He accordingly informed the War Department that the American Army must prepare to operate its own trains, made up of its own locomotives and cars, from the seaports to the front, over the French railways under trackage rights. I might add that the principle of trackage rights, so familiar in America, was entirely unknown in France, and at first the French railway officials did not know what Colonel Wilgus was talking about, for they found it difficult to understand how it was possible to operate two systems of transportation over the same tracks at the same time.

The story of how the Engineers, under the direction of Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, formerly vice-president of the Pennsylvania, Director-General of Transportation, with Colonel Wilgus as his deputy and Chief of Staff, built up in France a transportation system which was one of the marvels of the war, is outside the province of this narrative, while the story of the production of railway material in America and its shipment overseas would require, for its proper telling, a chapter to itself. It is enough to say that, when the Armistice was signed, 60,000 men were engaged on railroad work of various kinds in France; more than a thousand miles of standard-gauge railway (equal to the distance by the Pennsylvania from New York to Chicago) had been laid; upward of 1,300 locomotives (300 more than are owned by the Atchison system) had been shipped overseas, and, had the war continued, we would have had in France by July, 1919, enough American cars to make up a train the caboose of which would have been leaving Paris when the engine was entering Berlin.