CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT

To attempt aid or comfort to a fighting army six hundred miles inland from the coast without adequate transportation was quite out of the question. Transportation, in fact and in truth, was the lifeblood of the American Expeditionary Forces which began to debark at the Atlantic rim of France before the summer of 1917 was well spent. It was the obvious necessity of transportation that made it necessary for the War Department of the United States to plan to operate an American railroad system of some 6,000 miles of line--all told about equal to the length of the Northern Pacific system--over certain designated portions of the several French railway systems. Nothing was ever more true than the now trite Napoleonic remark, that an "army travels on its stomach." The imperial epigram about the progress of an army meant transportation, and little else.

In other days in other wars the transport of the United States was in the completely adequate hands of its Quartermaster General and its Corps of Engineers. But in those days we fought our wars in North America. The idea of an army of two million men--perhaps even four or five million--fighting nearly four thousand miles away from the homeland was quite beyond our conception. When that remote possibility became fact the necessities of our transport multiplied a thousandfold. They swept even beyond the capabilities of a Quartermaster General and a Chief of Engineers who found their abilities sore-taxed in many other directions than that of the water, the rail, and the highway movement of troops. It became a job for railroad men, expert railroad men, the most expert railroad men in the world. And where might railroad men be found more expert than those of the United States of America?

Purposely I am digressing for the moment from the Red Cross's individual problem of transport. I want you to see for an instant and in the briefest possible fashion, the United States Military Railroad in France, not alone because it must form the real and permanent background of any study of the transportation of the American Red Cross--itself a structure of no little magnitude--but also because in turn the Red Cross was able to render a large degree of real service to the railroad workers who had come far overseas from Collingwood or Altoona or Kansas City to run locomotives or operate yards or unload great gray ships. No Red Cross canteens have been of larger interest than those which sprung up beside the tracks at Tours or Gievres or Neufchateau or St. Nazaire or Ba.s.sens--all of these important operating points along the lines of the United States Military Railroad in France.

To run this Yankee railroad across the land of the lily required, as already I have intimated, expert railroad mentality. To head it no less a man than W. W. Atterbury, operating vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was chosen and given the rank of brigadier-general in charge of the rail transport of the S. O. S., as the doughboy and commissioned officers alike have come to know the Service of Supplies of the American Expeditionary Forces. Around himself General Atterbury a.s.sembled a group of practical railroaders, men whose judgment and experience long since have placed them in the front rank of American transportation experts.

Among these were Colonel W. J. Wilgus, former engineering vice-president of the New York Central system and the man who had made the first studies of the necessities and the possibilities of the United States Military Railroad in France; Colonel James A. McCrea, a son of the former president of the Pennsylvania and himself general manager of the Long Island Railroad at the time of our entrance into the war; Colonel F. A. Delano, a one-time president of the Wabash, who left a commissionership in the Federal Reserve Board to join the army, and Colonel G. T. Slade, former vice-president of the Northern Pacific.

These men are only a few out of a fairly lengthy roster of our Yankee railroad men in France. Yet they will serve to indicate the type of personnel which operated our lines in France. It would not be fair to close this paragraph without a reference to the patent fact that the high quality of the personnel of the official staff of our Yankee railroad overseas was fully reflected in the men of its rank and file.

These, too, were of the highest type of working railroaders, and to an American who knows anything whatsoever about the railroads of his homeland and the men who work upon them, more need not be said.

The United States Military Railroad in France, it should clearly be understood, was not a railroad system such as we build in America by patient planning and toil and the actual upturning of virgin soil. While many millions of dollars were expended in its construction, it was not, after all, a constructed railroad. In any legal or corporation sense it was not a railroad at all. It was in fact an adaptation of certain lines--side lines wherever possible--of long-existent French railways.

To best grasp it, one must first understand that the greater part of French rail transportation is divided into five great systems. Four of these--the Nord, the Etat, the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee, and the Orleans--shoot many of their main stems out from the heart of Paris, as the spokes of a wheel extend out from its hub. These spoke lines, if I may be permitted the phrase, long since were greatly overburdened with the traffic which arose from the vast army operations of the French, the British, and the Belgians. The problem was to make the French railway system bear upon its already much-strained back the additional transport necessities of our incoming army of at least two million men within the first twelve months of its actual operations.

Between the radiating spoke lines of the French railways leading out from the great hub of the wheel at Paris is a network of smaller and connecting lines, the most of them single-tracked, however. The whole structure, in fact, greatly resembles a huge spider's web; far more so than our own because of its more regular outlines. Colonel Wilgus and Colonel William Barclay Parsons, the designer of the first New York subway system, who accompanied him in the first inspection of the army transportation problem in France, quickly recognized this spider's web.

And a little inspection showed them the great burden that its main spokes already were carrying; convinced them of the necessity of using other lines for the traffic of the American Army. For it was known even then that in addition to carrying the men themselves there would have to be some 50,000 tons a day transported an average distance of six hundred miles for an army of two million men.

To strike across the spider's web! That was the solution of the problem.

Never mind if most of those cross-country connecting lines running at every conceivable angle to the main spoke lines and in turn bisecting the greater part of them, were for the most part single-tracked. Never mind if, as they began to climb the hills of Eastern France which held the eastern portions of the battle front--sectors a.s.signed quite largely to the Americans--they attained one per cent grade or better. In the valley of the Loire where a good part of our military rail route would be located there is the easiest and steadiest long-distance grade in all France. With American ingenuity and American labor it would be comparatively easy to double track the single-track lines and in some cases even to lower the gradients, while, for that matter, the ingenuity of American locomotive builders might rise quite easily to the problem of producing an effective locomotive to overcome these one per cent pulls.

I have spoken of the valley of the Loire because almost from the beginning it was chosen as the location of the chief main routes of the United States Military Railroad in France. Necessity dictated that location. It was both logical and efficient that the British should be given the great Channel ports for their supply service of men and munitions. Their endeavors so crowded Havre and Boulogne and Dieppe and Calais and Cherbourg, to say nothing of the rail lines which serve these ancient ports of the north of France, that they were out of the question for any large movement of American forces, although, as we shall see in good time, much Red Cross material, particularly in the early stages of our partic.i.p.ation in the war, did come through Havre.

The more distinctly American ports, however, were Brest, St. Nazaire, La Roch.e.l.le, and Bordeaux, as well as the rapidly created emergency port at Ba.s.sens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. All of these harbors are on the west coast of France and give more or less directly in the Atlantic Ocean itself. With the possible exception of Bordeaux, in recent years they have been rather sadly neglected ports. That no longer can be said, however, for within a s.p.a.ce of time to be measured by weeks and months rather than by years, they have become worthy of rank with the most efficient harbors of the world. It was necessity that made them so--the supreme necessity of the greatest war in history. So does the black cloud of war sometimes have its silver lining of permanent achievement.

These were the ports that became the starting points of the two main stems of the United States Military Railroad in France. Upon the great docks and within the huge warehouses that sprang up seemingly overnight were placed the constantly incoming loads of men and mules and horses and food and guns and camionettes and tents and five-ton trucks--all the seemingly endless paraphernalia of war. And from those docks and from those warehouses moved at all hours of the day and night long trains emptying them of all that same endless paraphernalia of war and in the same good order as that in which it arrived. And these trains were for the greater part of American-builded cars, hauled by locomotives from the engine-building shops of Philadelphia or Schenectady or Dunkirk and all operated by 75,000 expert railroaders, picked and culled from every state of the Union.

I shall not attempt here to go into further detail of the operation of our military railroad in France, although there is hardly a detail of it that is not fascinating in the extreme. It is enough here and now to say that it functioned; that our "contemptible army" wiped out the Saint Mihiel salient in one day, and, what is perhaps far more important, there were comparatively few instances where an American soldier went for a day without his three good meals. If I were an artist I would like to paint a picture for the beginning of this chapter. And because it was for a book of Red Cross activities primarily, the painting would show the operations of the United States Army Transport on land and water as a huge motley of ships and trains and warehouses and cranes in a gray monotone in the background; while in the foreground in gay array one would find the motor trucks, the camionettes, and the touring cars of the Red Cross's own transportation department.

To that department we now have come fairly and squarely. And, lest you should be tempted to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and a shoulder shrug, let me ask if you have been a woman worker for the Red Cross somewhere in our own beloved country, if you ever have given more than a pa.s.sing thought to the future of that gauze bandage that you made so deftly and so quickly and so many, many times? Did you ever wonder what became of the sweater, the helmet, or the wristlets which you knitted with such patient care and patriotic fervor? Or that warm and woolen gown which you took down from the closet hook with such a real sigh of self-denial--it still was so pretty and so new? How was it to reach some downhearted refugee of France?

It is comparatively easy to visualize the movement of the munitions of war across the three thousand miles of Atlantic and six hundred miles of France between our northeastern seaports and our front lines of battle--powder and food and uniforms and even aeroplanes and locomotives in giant crates. It perhaps is not quite as easy to trace, even in the mind's eye, the vast pa.s.sage of the steady output of the 20,000,000 pairs of patriotic hands from America to the boys at the front. It is a vast picture; a huge canvas upon which is etched at first many fine streams of traffic, gradually converging; forming rivulets, then rivers, and finally a single mighty river which, if I may continue the allegory without becoming too mixed in my metaphor, is carried overseas and across the entire width of the French republic. Sometimes the swift course of the river is checked for a time; the little still-water pools and eddies are the concentration stations and warehouses in America; and the other pools and eddies in France are where the precious relief supplies are held for careful and equitable distribution.

To the streams that have poured out of the homes and the Chapter workrooms that have supported the Red Cross so loyally and so royally, must be added the great floods of traffic, of purchased raw materials and supplies of every sort. Some of these last, like the output of the home workshops, will go to the boys at the front practically unchanged.

But a considerable quant.i.ty will be filtered through huge Red Cross workshops in Paris and other European cities, yet also goes forward to the front-line trenches.

It is well enough to look for a time at this huge problem as a great allegory or as a great picture; perhaps as one looks upon a great pageant. It has been a good deal more than that to the men who have had to be responsible for the successful working out of the problem. Come back behind the scenes and I shall try to show you the project as it appears to these men--a thing of hard realities and seemingly all but endless labor.

When Grayson M.-P. Murphy and his Commission made the preliminary survey trip to France in the interests of the American Red Cross in June, 1917, they took the man who was to solve their transportation problem right along with them. He was and still is Major Osborne.

There have been changes in the Red Cross personnel since first the American organization took up its big part of the international job at Paris. Men have come and men have gone. Big executives--five, ten, twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year men a plenty--have slammed down their desks in New York or Pittsburgh or Chicago or San Francisco and have given six months or a year willingly and gladly to the service of the Red Cross. For many of them well past the army age it seemingly was the only way that they could keep pace with their boys or their nephews in khaki. But Osborne did not measure his service by months. He came with the first and remained on the job until long months after the signing of the armistice.

I wish that I might write of C. G. Osborne as some veteran American railroader or at least as a man experienced in motor truck or highway transportation of some sort. For when one comes to measure the size of the job and the way that he measured up to it, it seems incredible that he has not had large transportation experience of some sort. Yet when the truth is told it is known that Major Osborne is a college man, with an astounding record as an athlete, but with little more actual traffic experience than falls to the lot of any average business man. Perhaps, after all, that was just as well, for to his big new job he not only brought vigor and strength but a freshness of mind that made him see it in all the breadth of its possibilities.

There were eighteen men in that pioneer survey party of the American Red Cross to France. Before the ship had left her dock in New York, Osborne was on his big new job, wiring the American Relief Clearing House in Paris--which at that time was the unified agency for all the American relief work of every sort that had sprung up in France since the war began in August, 1914, to buy six touring cars and to have them at Paris to meet the party. The American Relief Clearing House moved quickly. It already possessed three Renaults--good cars of a sort well suited to the hard necessities of the war-scarred highroads of France. It purchased three more touring cars of the same general type, and in these six cars the American Red Cross took its first real look at the field into which it was to enter--the field in which it was destined to play the greatest role in all of its eventful career.

The Clearing House, it should be understood quite clearly, was not at any time a war-relief agency upon its own account. It was, as its name indicates, a real clearing house or central station for a number of American relief organizations who came to the aid of the French long before the United States had entered the war, and the American Red Cross was privileged legally to enter into the relief work in connection with it. It received goods--sweaters, socks, medicines, even food--from the states and from England and distributed them, although not even this work was undertaken directly, but was handled through _transitaires_, who made the direct distributions. Because of the rather limited nature of its work, therefore, it needed little actual equipment. In June, 1917, it only owned eight touring cars and three trucks; and all of these were pretty badly shot to pieces by hard service and by lack of repairs. But these it turned over to the Red Cross and they became the nucleus of the American Red Cross transportation organization in France.

"What we are going to need here," said Major Osborne to his fellows before he had been on the new job a fortnight, "is to create a real transportation service and to build it up from the bottom. What I really have in mind is the organization of something like one of our express companies back in the United States."

If you know anything at all about our inland transportation system in America you must realize that our express companies--one of our most distinctive forms of national transportation, by the way--although closely related to our railroads are in no real sense a part of them.

For, while they have their largest functions upon railroad trains, particularly pa.s.senger trains, they also maintain in all the towns and cities that they serve great fleets or squadrons of horse-drawn or motor-drawn trucks. And in recent years they have increased their carrying functions from the small parcels for which they originally were designed into the heaviest types of freight. I have known a carload of steel girders to move from New York to Newark, eight miles distant, by express.

Osborne's idea of the Red Cross Express was fundamentally sound, and perhaps it is because it was so fundamentally sound that it has been so very successful, although working many times against tremendous odds. He recognized from the first that it would be foolish to use Red Cross motor trucks for long-distance hauls, such as from Havre to Paris, for instance, save in cases of great emergency. The railroad service of France, although greatly hampered and handicapped during the war, was at no time broken down. And it was not necessary, as in Great Britain and in the United States, to take it out of the hands of its private owners and place it under direct government control.

Osborne realized that he would be compelled to place his chief reliance upon the French railways. The United States Military Railroad, especially at the outset, was not to be compared in value with that of the main stems of the French systems, particularly those which radiate out from Paris. So he made immediate arrangements with the French Minister of Railways for the transport of Red Cross supplies from the various Atlantic ports to Paris and other distributing stations as well as right up to the railheads behind the lines themselves. And the French on their part generously and immediately gave free transportation to all Red Cross supplies, as well as to all persons bound to any part of France exclusively on Red Cross work. In addition arrangements were made by which the Red Cross personnel bound on vacation leaves or other personal errands through France might avail themselves of the very low pa.s.senger rates heretofore only granted to soldiers in uniform.

With his plan of utilization of the railroads for long-distance hauls firmly fixed, Osborne promptly went to work to organize his fleet of trucks and touring cars in the various cities of France where the American Red Cross has touched with its activities. That meant not alone the securing of sufficient motor cars of the various sorts necessary to the situation, but of garages and repair facilities of every sort; this last particularly difficult in a nation which for three years had been war-racked and hard put to it to meet her own necessities of motor transportation. But from a beginning of three trucks and eight touring cars from the American Relief Clearing House, whose activities were quickly absorbed by the Red Cross, a mighty fleet of trucks and camions and camionettes and touring cars slowly was a.s.sembled. Before Osborne had been in France a month he had purchased at Paris fifty-five sizable trucks, twenty-five of which had been unloaded at Havre and which had been destined originally for an American firm in France and another thirty which were turned over by the French Minister of Munitions. The entire fifty-five trucks were all at work by the end of July, 1917, when the first of the relief supplies from America began to roll, a mighty tidal wave into France.

On November 11, 1918, the day that the armistice was signed and another great milestone in the progress of the world erected, the transport department of the American Red Cross in France possessed a mighty fleet of 1,285 trucks and touring cars, moving some 5,000 tons of supplies each week. The greater part of these were in actual and constant service, the rest being held in its great garages and shops for painting and repairs. To these shops we shall come in good time.

I would not have you think of the transport problem too largely as a problem of the motor truck, however. I should prefer to have you see another picture; this one a perspective--France rolled flat before your eyes, the blue Atlantic upon one side and the mountainous German frontier upon the other. Across this great perspective--call it a map, if you will--are furrowed many fine lines. The spider web once again!

Here are the railways radiating out, like spokes of the wheel, from Paris. Here are the ma.s.s of connecting and cross-country lines. And here the one of these that must remain impressed upon the minds of Americans--the double main stem of the United States Military Railroad in France reaching chiefly from the ports of Bordeaux and of St. Nazaire with fainter but clear defined tendrils from La Roch.e.l.le and Brest as well. And if the eye be good or the gla.s.s half strong enough one can see the steady line of American transports coming to these four harbors--the "bridge across the Atlantic" of which our magazine writers used to prate so glibly but a little time ago.

As I write, the list of the French ports at which the transport department of the Red Cross conducts its chief activities is before me.

In addition to the four which have just been mentioned, one finds Toulon and Ma.r.s.eilles, upon the Mediterranean: Ba.s.sens, La Pallice, Nantes, Havre, Rouen, Dunkirk and Calais. Not all of these were American ports.

Some of them were reserved exclusively for the British. But they were all ports for the American Red Cross, which frequently found it necessary or advisable to buy supplies, raw or manufactured, in England.

The bulk of our materials came, however, to the American ports; and at some of them our Red Cross maintained more than a merely sizable organization. At least at six, it had a captain, thirty or forty French or American helpers, and perhaps from seventy-five to a hundred _boche_ prisoners who performed the hardest of the actual work upon the piers and within the warehouses. There was much work to be done. The plants were huge. In St. Nazaire, for instance, the Red Cross warehouse alone could hold more than eight thousand cases of supplies beneath its roof, and in course of the busiest days of the war, just before the signing of the armistice, it was no uncommon thing for this great warehouse to be completely emptied and refilled within seven days. At the one port of St. Nazaire it was necessary to a.s.sign six large trucks, and yet the movement of Red Cross supplies from this great port was exclusively upon the trains of the United States Military Railroad.

As fast as the freight came pouring out from the holds of the ships it was carted into the warehouses, where it was carefully checked and a receipt sent back to America, noting any shortages or overages. Then it found its way to the trains. If it was to an American train the process was simple enough; merely the waybill transaction which is so familiar to every American business man who ever has had freight dealings with our Yankee railroads. If it went upon the French railways, however, either in carload or less than carload lots, it rode upon the _ordre de transport_ which, although issued and personally signed by Major Osborne, was the free gift of the French Minister of Railways. These _ordres de transport_ differed from waybills chiefly in the fact that they give gross weights but no listing of the contents of the cases.

This last was accomplished by the _bordereaux_, which was purely a Red Cross doc.u.ment.

The work of the port manager of the American Red Cross at one of these important water gates of France was no sinecure, indeed. Here is the testimony of one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. M. Erwin, who was in charge of its terminal transportation work, first at Le Havre and then at Nantes. He writes:

"In my branch of the activities I have performed no heroisms. I have not rushed out in the middle of the night to carry food or dressings to the front while dodging bombs or bullets, but I have crawled out of bed at five o'clock and six o'clock in the morning to wade through snow and mud in the quays, trying to boss the unloading of Red Cross goods from a ship and their transshipment to warehouse, car, or ca.n.a.l boat. I am like my confreres of other seaports in France--I haven't had a chance to expose my person to battle dangers--nothing more than the hazards of abnormal movement and traffic, tumbling cranes and falling bales, automobile eccentricities, climatic exposures, and a few similar trifles.

"I have had my trials of dealing with the formalities of war departments, likewise with their machine-made exactions, and with all the types of Monsieur Le Bureau, with the general and the corporal, with the teamsters who arrive late--or not at all--with the auto truck which breaks down, with the _boche_ prisoner gang which reports to the wrong place two miles away, with the vermin that steals things out of cracked cases, with the flivver that I can't start, with the navigation colonel who before the war was a plain clerk who wore store clothes, with the railway station master who can't give me any cars, with 119 cases of jam that are 'busted' and must be repaired, at once, and atop of all this the rain which has been raining for seven weeks and won't stop."

The tone of the port manager's letter suddenly changes from sarcasm to the romance of his big job.

"If a bale or a case of goods could talk," he writes, "and tell you all about its trip from Spokane, Washington, to the emergency hospital near Chateau-Thierry, its narrative would form a chain story of freight cars and docks and stevedores, somber seclusion in a deep hold, tempests and submarines alert, the clanking of chains and the creaking of slings, shouts, orders, and oaths, bangings about in rain and snow, nails and cords yielding under the tension of rush and brutality, voices and hands of inimitable _uber alles_ prisoner teams, lonesome sleeps in dark warehouses, gnawings of nocturnal rats, more trips to the unknown, _pet.i.te vitesse_ which averages five miles an hour, and--finally--destination, arrival, identification, application, and appreciation. The voyage and itinerary of a case of goods for the Red Cross compose an odyssey and very few human packages ever perform displacements so replete with incidents and interest."