Our Army at the Front Part 6

When they masked and went into the gas-chamber the care they took with straps and buckles could not have been bettered. One or two of the men fainted from heat and nervousness, but n.o.body caught the temporary blindness that would have been their lot if the gas had not been held off. And after the first few entrants had returned none the worse, the rest made a lark of it, and the whole experience stamped on their minds the uselessness of gas as a weapon if you're handy with the mask.

The first insistence on rifle use and marksmans.h.i.+p, which General Pers.h.i.+ng was to stress later with all the eloquence he had, was heard in late August. The French said frankly they had neglected the power of the rifle, and the Americans were put to work to avoid the same mistake. In target-shooting with rifles the Americans got their first taste of supremacy. They ceased being novitiates for as long as they held their rifles, and became respected and admired experts. The first English Army, "the Old Contemptibles," had all been expert rifle-shots, and, after a period when rifle fire was almost entirely absent from the battle-fields, tacticians began to recall this fact, and the cost it had entailed upon the Germans.

So the doughboys added rifle fire to their other jobs.

About this time the day of the doughboy was a pattern of compactness, though he called it a harsher name.

It began in the training area at five o'clock in the morning. One regiment had a story that some of the farm lads used to beat the buglers up every day and wander about disconsolate, wondering why the morning was being wasted. This was probably fictional. As a rule, five o'clock came all too early. There was little opportunity to roll over and have another wink, for roll-call came at five-thirty, and this was followed by brief setting-up exercises, designed to give the men an ambition for breakfast. At this meal French customs were not popular. The poilu, who begins his day with black coffee and a little bread, was always amazed to see the American soldier engaged with griddle-cakes and corned-beef hash, and such other substantial things as he could get at daybreak.

Just after breakfast sick-call was sounded. It was up to the ailing man to report at that time as a sufferer or forever after hold his peace.

While the sick were engaged in reporting themselves the healthy men tidied up. Work proper began at seven.

As a rule, bombing, machine-gun, and automatic-rifle fire practice came in the mornings. Time was called at eleven and the soldiers marched back to billets for the midday meal. Later, when the work piled up even more, the meals were prepared on the training-grounds. Rifle and bayonet practice came in the afternoon. Four o'clock marked the end of the working-day for all except captains and lieutenants, who never found any free time in waking hours. In fact, most of the excited youngsters--almost all under thirty--let their problems perturb their dreams. The doughboys amused themselves with swims, walks, concerts, supper, and French children till nine o'clock, when they were always amiable toward going to bed.

With September came the British to supplement the French and, after a little, to go far toward replacing them. For the Blue Devils had still work to do on the Germans, and their "vacation" could not last too long.

A fine and spectacular sham battle put a climax to the stay of the French, when, after artillery preparation, the Blue Devils took the newly made American trenches, advancing under heavy barrage. The three objectives were named Mackensen, Von Kluck, and Ludendorff. The artillery turned everything it had into the slow-moving screen, under which the "chasers" crept toward the foe. All the watching doughboys had been instructed to put on their shrapnel helmets. At the pitch of the battle some officers found their men using their helmets as good front seats for the show, but fortunately there were no casualties. Words do not kill.

The departure of the Blue Devils was attended by a good deal of home-made ceremony and a universal deep regret. A genuine liking had sprung up between the Americans and their French preceptors, and when they marched away from camp the soldiers flung over them what detachable trophies they had, the strains of all their bands, the unified good wishes of the whole First Division, and unnumbered promises to be a credit to their teachers when they got into the line.

It was the bayonet which proved the first connecting-link between the Americans and the British. American observers had decided after a few weeks that the bayonet was a peculiarly British weapon, and in consequence it was decided that for this phase of the training, the army should rely on the British rather than the French.

The British General Staff obligingly supplied the chief bayonet instructor of their army with a number of a.s.sisting sergeants, and the squad was sent down to camp.

The British brought two important things, in addition to expert bayoneting. They were, first, a familiar bluntness of criticism, which the Americans had rather missed with the polite French, and a compet.i.tive spirit, stirred up wherever possible between rival units of the A. E. F.

Their willingness to "act" their practice was another factor, though in that they did not excel the French except in that they could impart it to the Americans.

The British theory of bayonet work proved to be almost wholly offensive.

They went at their instruction of it with undimmed fire. At the end of the first week, they gave a demonstration to some visiting officers.

Three short trenches had been constructed in a little dip of land, and the spectators stood on the hill above them. On the opposite slope tin cans shone brightly, hoisted on sticks.

"Ready, gentlemen," said the drill-sergeant. "Prepare for trench bayonet practice by half sections. You're to take these three lines of trenches, lay out every Boche in the lot, and then get to cover and fire six rounds at them 'ere tin hats. Don't waste a shot, gentlemen, every bullet a Boche. Now, then, ready--over the top, and give 'em 'ell, right in the stomach."

Over the top they went and did as they were told. But the excitement was not great enough to please the drill-sergeant. He turned to the second section, and put them through at a rounder pace. Then he took over some young officers, who were being instructed to train later troops, at cleaning out trenches. Sacks representing Germans were placed in a communicating trench.

"Now, remember, gentlemen," said the sergeant, "there's a Fritz in each one of these 'ere cubby-'oles, and 'e's no dub, is Fritz. 'E's got ears all down 'is back. Make your feet pneumatic. For 'eaven's sake, don't sneeze, or 'is nibs will sling you a bomb like winkin', and there'll be a narsty mess. Ready, Number One! 'Ead down, bayonet up ... it's no use stickin' out your neck to get a sight of Fritzie in 'is 'ole. Why, if old Fritz was there, 'e'd just down your point, and then where'd you be?

Why, just a blinkin' casualty, and don't you forget it. Ready again, bayonet up. Now you see 'em. Quick, down with your point and at 'im.

Tickle 'is gizzard. Not so bad, but I bet you waked 'is nibs in the next 'ole. Keep in mind you're fightin' for your life...."

By the time the officers were into the trench, the excitement was terrific.

It was such measures as these that made the bayonet work go like lightning, and cut down the time required at it by more than one-half.

The organized recreation and the compet.i.tions, two st.u.r.dy British expedients for morale, always came just after these grimmest of all of war's practices. The more foolish the game, the more rapturously the British joined in it. Red Rover and prisoner's base were two prime favorites. A British major said the British Army had discovered that when the men came out of the trenches, f.a.gged and horror-struck, the surest way to bring them back was to set them hard at playing some game remembered from their childhood.

The British had even harder work, at first, to make the men fall in with the games than they had with war practice. But the friendly spirit existing basically between English and Americans, however spatty their exterior relations.h.i.+ps may sometimes be, finally got everybody in together. The Americans found that a British instructor would as lief call them "rotten" if he thought they deserved it, but that he did it so simply and inoffensively that it was, on the whole, very welcome.

So the Americans learned all they could from French and British, and began the scheme of turning back on themselves, and doing their own instructing.

The infantry camp was destined to have some offshoots, as the number of men grew larger, and the specialists required intensive work. Officers'

schools sprang up all over France, and all the supplemental forces, which had infantry training at first, scattered off to their special training, notably the men trained to throw gas and liquid fire.

But, for the most part, the camp in the Vosges remained the big central mill it was designed to be, and in late October, when three battalions put on their finis.h.i.+ng touches in the very battle-line, the cycle was complete. Before the time when General Pers.h.i.+ng offered the Expeditionary Force to Generalissimo Foch, to put where he chose, the giant treadway from sea to camp and from camp to battle was grinding in monster rhythms. It never thereafter feared any influx of its raw material.

CHAPTER VIII

BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS

THE American Expeditionary Force which went into the great training-schools of France and England was like nothing so much as a child who, having long been tutored in a programme of his own make, an abundance of what he liked and nothing of what he didn't, should be thrust into some grade of a public school. He would be ridiculously advanced in mathematics and a dunce at grammar, or historian to his finger-tips and ignorant that two and two make four. He would amaze his fellow pupils in each respect equally.

And that was the lot of the Expeditionary Force. The French found them backward in trench work and bombing, and naturally enough expected that backwardness to follow through. They conceded the natural quickness of the pupils, but saw a long road ahead before they could become an army.

Then the Americans tackled artillery, hardest and deepest of the war problems, and suddenly blossomed out as experts.

Of course, the a.n.a.logy is not to be leaned on too heavily. The Americans were not, on the instant, the arch-exponents of artillery in all Europe.

But it is true that in comparison to the size of their army, and to the extent to which they had prepared nationally for war, their artillery was stronger than that of any other country on the Allied side at the beginning of the war, notwithstanding that it was the point where they might legitimately have been expected to be the weakest.

Hilaire Belloc called the American artillery preparation one of the most dramatic and welcome surprises of the war.

It must be understood that all this applies only to men and not in the least to guns. For big guns, the American reliance was wholly upon France and England, upon the invitation of those two countries when America entered the war.

And the readiness of America's men was not due to a large preparation in artillery as such. The blessing arose from the fact that the coast defense could be diverted, within the first year of war, to the handling of the big guns for land armies, and thus strengthen the artillery arm sent to France for final training.

Artillery was every country's problem, even in peace-times. It was the service which required the greatest wealth and the most profound training. There was no such thing as a citizenry trained to artillery.

Mathematics was its stronghold, and no smattering could be made to do.

Even more than mathematics was the facility of handling the big guns when mathematics went askew from special conditions.

These things the coast defense had, if not in final perfection, at least in creditable degree. And the diversion of it to the artillery in France stiffened the backbone of the Expeditionary Force to the pride of the force and the glad amazement of its preceptors.

One other thing the coast defense had done: it had pre-empted the greater part of America's attention in times of peace and unpreparedness, so that big-gun problems had received a disproportionate amount of study. The American technical journals on artillery were always of the finest. The war services were honeycombed with men who were big-gun experts.

So when the first artillery training-school opened in France, in mid-August of 1917, the problems to be faced were all of a more or less external character.

The first of these, of course, was airplane work. The second was in mastering gun differences between American and French types, and in learning about the enormous numbers of new weapons which had sprung from battle almost day by day.

The camp, when the Americans moved in, had much to recommend it to its new inhabitants. There need be no attempt to conceal the fact that first satisfaction came with the barracks, second with the weather, and only third with the guns and planes.

Some of the artillerymen had come from the infantry camps, and some direct from the coast. Those from the Vosges camp were boisterous in their praise of their quarters. They had brick barracks, with floors, and where they were billeted with the French they found excellent quarters in the old, low-lying stone and brick houses. The weather would not have been admired by any outsider. But to the men from the Vosges it owed a reputation, because they extolled it both day and night. The artillery camp was in open country, to permit of the long ranges, and if it sunned little enough, neither did it rain.

The guns and airplanes supplied by the French were simple at first, becoming, as to guns at least, steadily more numerous and complicated as the training went on.

The men began on the seventy-fives, approximately the American three-inch gun, and on the howitzers of twice that size.

The airplane service was the only part of the work wholly new to the men, and, naturally enough, it was the most attractive.