The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  The IWW’s local issued a statement describing the strike as nothing more than a “preliminary skirmish” and saying that the fight would be over “only when the working class has overthrown the capitalist class and has secured undisputed possession of the earth and all that is in it and on it.” A dignified silence would have been wiser. It was foolhardy to put out such a clear reminder of just how far out of the mainstream, how unlike the nice people of the AFL, the IWW actually was.

  Chapter 13

  ____

  Welcome to France

  IF YOU WERE an American in the second half of 1917 and wanted a safe, simple, and stress-free life, you could do worse than go to France with Major General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force.

  You would not want to be in Washington. That was a long-running cockfight. It was where Democrats and Republicans, businessmen and bureaucrats, generals and admirals—all professing to want nothing but to help the nation win the war—were constantly at one another’s throats over money, policy, and power.

  Shipping Out

  By 1918 more doughboys were ready for transfer to France than ships could be found to carry.

  And you wouldn’t want to be in many other parts of the United States, either, unless you were prepared to keep any unorthodox opinions to yourself. America beyond the District of Columbia was where the war could get a person hurt. Right through until the spring of 1918, war-related violence caused more injuries and deaths at home than in the AEF.

  Still, you would definitely want to be American, if you wanted to be safe. For every other belligerent nation, the war continued to be a bloodbath. As in 1915 and 1916, almost all of the major battles of 1917 turned out to be disasters for whichever side started them (and usually for the other side as well). April’s Nivelle Offensive, which Joseph Joffre’s successor as French commander in chief had promised would end the Western Front stalemate, was only the worst of the year’s horrific examples. General Henri-Philippe Pétain, upon replacing the discredited Robert Nivelle, found himself having to deal with the mutinies sparked by the failure of the offensive. Though he had the ringleaders of the mutiny hanged, he also toured the front, promising better treatment for the troops and an end to wasteful campaigns. All this was over before Pershing and his staff set foot in France.

  Henri-Philippe Pétain

  He saved France twice, first as commander at Verdun, then in dealing with troop mutinies.

  When the next great convulsion came, on July 1, it took place on the faraway Eastern Front. Alexander Kerensky, the young lawyer who headed the provisional government that had taken over in Russia when Tsar Nicholas abdicated, was pledged to keep his country in the war. He ordered a summer campaign (it would be named after him and also called the Liberty Offensive) to demonstrate that the new Russia was superior to the old and fully capable of doing its part.

  In charge of the offensive was the new Russian commander in chief, the same General Alexei Brusilov who in 1916 had led a fabulously successful attack on the Austro-Hungarian armies in Galicia. He gathered together the last of his nation’s military resources, two hundred thousand men and thirteen hundred pieces of artillery, on a thirty-mile stretch of front. With Brusilov commanding, and attacking on familiar ground now held by the Germans, the chances of success seemed excellent. And in the early going, the Russians seemed very successful indeed, overrunning the enemy’s forward positions with surprisingly little difficulty. But this was a cruel illusion. It had been made possible by the new German system of defense-in-depth, which intentionally left the front line weak and permeable, designed to be given up after token resistance. The main defensive forces were kept well to the rear, comparatively safe from enemy artillery, poised to counterattack when the opportunity ripened.

  Kerensky and Brusilov had failed to grasp one hard fact: that the Russian soldiers, even more than the French, had had enough. As soon as the German counterattack came, they turned and ran, shooting any officers who tried to stop them. They ran not just back to their starting point but as far as their legs would carry them, away from the front, away from the fighting, home. An entire army disappeared that day, as though into thin air.

  The debacle left Russia all but defenseless. It discredited Kerensky and his government and gave new credibility to V. I. Lenin’s hard-core branch of Russian Communists, the Bolsheviks. They understood that Kerensky’s fatal blunder had been to persuade himself, somehow, that a patriotic population had turned on the tsar because it believed him willing to enter into a separate peace with the Germans. The Bolsheviks knew better. They saw that if they could seize power, to keep it they were going to have to get out of the war. The people would have no more of it.

  Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force

  He approved of Pershing’s “quiet gentlemanly bearing—so unusual for an American.”

  That same July Pershing, accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant George S. Patton, interrupted his work in Paris to accept an invitation to visit Douglas Haig at the headquarters of the BEF. He concealed behind his unflappable soldierly demeanor the shock of learning that the British had lost 125,000 men—killed, wounded, and missing—in their recent Arras offensive. This was triple the number of American troops then in France, more than Pershing expected to have under his command at the end of the year. It had not, however, stopped Haig from preparing still another of the ever-bigger, never-successful offensives that were making his name synonymous with the brainless use of brute force. (He called the machine gun a fad and clung until the end of the war to his conviction that mounted cavalry would ultimately sweep the Germans from the field.)

  This new attack, to be launched at the end of July and known as the Third Battle of Ypres, was to be bigger than Nivelle’s. It was to be bigger even than Haig’s own 1916 Battle of the Somme, which had cost the Entente sixty thousand casualties, including almost twenty thousand dead, on its first day. Third Ypres was preceded by an artillery barrage that poured four million rounds, a hundred thousand of them poison gas, down on the German defenses. But when the whistles finally blew and the infantry climbed out of its trenches and advanced, Third Ypres turned into another protracted, heartbreaking failure. It would go on for more than three months, moving the Allied line two miles forward at a cost of three hundred thousand casualties. It would culminate in November in the agony of mud and blood to be remembered forever as Passchendaele.

  There were some 65,000 American troops in France by the time of Third Ypres, but not one of them had seen any action. Pershing was sticking firmly to the War Department’s plan, to the teeth-grinding exasperation of the British and French. The troops of the AEF, for some obscure reason now called “doughboys” by the war correspondents and headline writers (Pershing had rejected the suggestion that they be called “sammies”), were not to be sent into combat until the two original conditions had been met. They had to be brought up to what Pershing regarded as a professional level of readiness, and there had to be enough of them to take up a position on the front comparable to those of the British and the French. Before the end of September, a report prepared by Pershing’s staff informed a surprised Washington that this was not going to be possible until the spring of 1919. New troops were arriving too slowly, and were in need of too much training, for anything better to be possible.

  The lead elements of the AEF’s First Division, upon arriving in France in late June, had been received with wild enthusiasm everywhere they went. When the French authorities made it known that they wanted Yank troops to march down Paris’s Champs-Élysées as the centerpiece of a specially arranged Fourth of July celebration, Pershing at first refused. He knew that even the regiments that had served with him in Mexico now contained large numbers of inexperienced recruits, that they had been given barely enough training to be considered bona fide soldiers, and that their ill-fitting uniforms and soft hats (they had been sent abroad without helmets) were not likely to impress. He finally consented to sending a single battalion.
If they looked like beginners, it did not matter. Masses of cheering Parisians poured love on the men come to save them.

  Training, training, and more training

  It was all the troops were allowed to do, until Pershing decided they were ready.

  Their taciturn general, with his stern demeanor and severely trimmed mustache, made a good impression on his Allied counterparts. Even the snobbish Haig, son of one of Scotland’s leading whisky-making dynasties, confessed to his diary that he “was much struck with [Pershing’s] quiet gentlemanly bearing—so unusual for an American.” The AEF staff was in crowded quarters in Paris, coming to grips with the challenge of bringing into existence and sustaining a fighting force incomparably larger than anything the United States had possessed in the preceding half century. It was a challenge of an entirely new kind. The world had been simpler the last time Washington had a great army. And in Ulysses S. Grant’s day there had not been an ocean between his headquarters and Washington.

  Almost everything had to be built from scratch. Even the organization and command structure of the AEF had to be improvised, the army’s directives on such matters having been written by men who could not have foreseen what 1917 would bring. Pershing appointed as his chief of staff a man he had known since his days in the Philippines, James G. Harbord, who had entered the service as a private in 1889 and was now a regular army major. Together they designed a headquarters organization with five divisions (administrative policy, intelligence, operations, coordination, and training) and five assistant chiefs of staff to direct the quartermaster corps, the engineers, and the ordnance, medical, and transportation operations. The quality of the talent pool was high, Pershing having been free to select whichever officers he wished to accompany him to France. In it were future legends, most notably Captain George Marshall and Lieutenant Patton and a man with a visionary’s understanding of the potential of military aviation, Lieutenant Colonel William (Billy) Mitchell.

  Everything that needed to be done turned out to be an almost overwhelming challenge. Just moving a single division of the size decided on by Pershing (28,000 men, double the total for British, French, and German divisions at full strength) required sixty trains—not railroad cars, but whole trains. All the numbers were astronomical, even the numbers of horses and mules needed for the movement of artillery, ammunition, and food—everything. Early on, at the height of its excitement about the American declaration of war, the French government promised to provide the AEF with 100,000 horses. That was soon reduced to 80,000, and even the lower figure proved impossible. The French armies needed their horses, and when the Americans tried to buy animals on the open market they found few sellers except those hoping to unload sorry nags for high prices. The farmers, too, needed such horses as they still had, as did merchants and tradesmen. It came to be rumored that the French were conspiring to force the Americans to import their own horses, so that when the war ended a superabundance would be available. By hook and by crook, the AEF gradually acquired thousands and then tens of thousands of horses, and their care and feeding became still another headache. Transporting fodder required still more trains on a daily basis.

  Unloading the horn of plenty

  The quantities of equipment and supplies that the United States shipped to France were measured in astronomical numbers.

  The AEF needed a supply and transportation system that would be adequate to the need while neither interfering with the Allies nor becoming dependent on them. Before this could be arranged, it was necessary to find a home for the American troops somewhere along the Western Front. It was clear from the start that the Americans should operate in closer proximity to the French than to the British. The attitude that Colonel House and the Anglophile Wilson administration had maintained during the years of neutrality, regarding France as Britain’s distant and distinctly junior partner, was no longer tenable. Now France was the host country, needing to be treated with respect, and her central place in the war had become clear to the newcomers. Now it was the British who would be left more or less to themselves—to their part of the deadlocked front, up north in Flanders.

  The sectors of front nearest Paris were off-limits; the protection of the capital had to be left to the French. What remained were the areas farther east, nearer Germany. When he studied his maps, Pershing found something he liked. It was far to the east, between the Argonne Forest and the Vosges Mountains: the area around the vast Verdun battleground, where France and Germany had nearly bled each other to death in 1916. It was directly opposite, and therefore perfectly positioned for an attack on, the Germans’ St. Mihiel salient, a protrusion into the French trench line beyond which lay rich iron and coal mines, crucial rail lines, and the important city of Metz. Better still, the Moselle River ran through the area, down to where it crosses into Germany proper, becomes the Mosel, and flows into the Rhine at Koblenz. It beckoned to Pershing as a virtual highway into Germany. The whole situation was ideal in terms of Pershing’s ultimate objective: an opportunity, when the AEF was ready, to strike the great blow that would ensure Germany’s defeat.

  He went to see General Pétain and told him what he wanted. Pétain agreed, and the deal was done. Pershing moved his staff to a château outside the handsome old town of Chaumont, south of Verdun. The First Division followed. The work of making things happen could now begin in earnest.

  Home sweet home

  Western Front style.

  Their new base can hardly have been what the doughboys had envisioned when given their orders for France. For one thing, there would be no fighting for almost any of them for another half year or more. What hundreds of thousands of them would instead experience through one dreary month after another was endless days and nights of boredom, drill, and discomfort. Because the French lacked decent accommodations even for their own troops, and because building anything like the cantonments back in the States was logistically out of the question, enlisted men as they arrived in Lorraine were billeted in the farm buildings, usually barns and stables and storage spaces, that dotted the countryside. They slept on straw, which soon became damp and dank and provided a breeding ground for the lice (“cooties” to the troops) that were the curse of every army, not only a torment as they feasted on human blood but the cause of trench fever.

  Filling the empty hours

  Playing baseball was one way to break the tedium of camp life and rifle drill.

  Pershing’s West Point classmate Robert Lee Bullard would recall one particularly unexpected feature of French rural life: “the fumier—the heap of manure piled at the front door of every villager—the sign of his thrift and even of his wealth, but a disagreeable thing, irritating and dangerous in the dark, and a kind of front yard ornamentation to which our soldiers could never become accustomed.” This was far from the only source of friction between the soldiers and the people among whom they were living. The Americans, young, looking for fun, and not always respectful of other people’s property, sometimes seemed an army of occupation more than of liberation. The French, for their part, could seem to have their hands always out, wanting to be paid for every small thing.

  Though the doughboys’ diet was generous—more than four thousand calories daily, nearly a third higher than British or French rations—a chronic scarcity of food in the Allied nations meant that the Americans had to be fed almost entirely with imports from the United States. The result was a cumulatively disgusting reliance on a variety of beef, imported from Argentina and canned in Chicago, that the troops called “monkey meat.” Freshness and variety were rare and became rarer as the transporting of ever-greater numbers of men left less shipboard space for canned fruit and vegetables and the like. Eight hundred million pounds of canned beef were shipped across the Atlantic, along with 150 million pounds of canned pork, a billion pounds of flour, and almost half a billion pounds of potatoes. Lacking mess halls, the men ate in the streets and roadways, out of their mess kits, rain or shine.

  They drilled and trained and dri
lled and trained again, often under French or British combat veterans. Opportunities for diversion were limited almost to the point of nonexistence. A tartly clever eighteen-year-old private named Arthur Yensen, author of an undeservedly unpublished memoir that he titled “War Log of an Underdog,” made a list of the people and things he came to regard as his enemies in the empty months before the AEF finally went into action:

  Our officers head the list, because they never do us any good; they’re cranky, arrogant and unreasonable. They have so much power that they can have us shot for nothing if they want to; and since we have no protection against them, I call them our arch-enemies.

  The weather ranks second because in these leaky clothes, the cold rain and must are slowly sapping the life out of us….