And they thought we wouldn't fight

The barracks had been long unoccupied and much preparatory work was necessary before our artillerymen could move in. Much of this work devolved upon the shoulders of the Brigade Quartermaster.

The first difficulty that he encountered was the matter of illumination for the barracks, mess halls and lecture rooms. All of the buildings were wired, but there was no current. The Quartermaster began an investigation and this was what he found:

The post had been supplied with electricity from a generating plant located on a river about ten miles away. This plant had supplied electrical energy for fifteen small French towns located in the vicinity. The plant was owned and operated by a Frenchman, who was about forty years old. The French Government, realising the necessity for illumination, had exempted this man from military service, so that he remained at his plant and kept the same in operation for the benefit of the camp at Valdahon and the fifteen small towns nearby.

Then the gossips of the countryside got busy. These people began to say that Monsieur X, the operator of the plant, was not patriotic, in other words, that he was a slacker for not being at the front when all of their menfolk had been sent away to the war.

Now it so happened that Monsieur X was not a slacker, and his inclination had always been to get into the fight with the Germans, but the Government had represented to him that it was his greater duty to remain and keep his plant in operation to provide light for the countryside.

When the talk of the countryside reached Monsieur X's ears, he being a country-loving Frenchman was infuriated. He denounced the gossips as being unappreciative of the great sacrifice he had been making for their benefit, and, to make them realise it, he decided on penalising them.

Monsieur X simply closed down his plant, locked and barred the doors and windows, donned his French uniform and went away to the front to join his old regiment. That night those villagers in the fifteen nearby towns, who had been using electrical illumination, went to bed in the dark.

It required considerable research on the part of the Artillery Quartermaster to reveal all these facts. The electric lights had been unused for fifteen months when he arrived there, and he started to see what he could do to put the plant back to work. It required nothing less finally than a special action by the French Minister of War whereby orders were received by Monsieur X commanding him to leave his regiment at the front and go back to his plant by the riverside and start making electricity again.

With the lights on and water piped in for bathing facilities, and extensive arrangements made for the instalment of stoves and other heating apparatus, the purchase of wood fuel and fodder for the animals, the Brigade moved in and occupied the camp.

The American officer in command of that post went there as a Brigadier General. As I observed him at his work in those early days, I seemed to see in his appearance and disposition some of the characteristics of a Grant. He wore a stubby-pointed beard and he clamped his teeth tight on the butt end of a cigar. I saw him frequently wearing the $11.50 regulation issue uniform of the enlisted men. I saw him frequently in rubber boots standing hip deep in the mud of the gun pits, talking to the men like a father – a kindly, yet stern father who knew how to produce discipline and results.

While at the post, he won promotion to a Major General's rank, and in less than six months he was elevated to the grade of a full General and was given the highest ranking military post in the United States. That man who trained our first artillerymen in France was General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

Finding the right man for the right place was one of General March's hobbies. He believed in military mobilisation based on occupational qualifications. In other words, he believed that a man who had been a telephone operator in civilian life would make a better telephone operator in the army than he would make a gunner.

I was not surprised to find that this same worthy idea had permeated in a more or less similar form down to the lowest ranks in General March's command at that time. I encountered it one cold night in October, when I was sitting in one of the barrack rooms talking with a man in the ranks.

That man's name was Budd English. I met him first in Mexico on the American Punitive Expedition, where he had driven an automobile for Damon Runyon, a fellow correspondent. English, with his quaint Southwestern wit, had become in Mexico a welcome occupant of the large pyramidal tent which housed the correspondents attached to the Expedition. We would sit for hours hearing him tell his stories of the plains and the deserts of Chihuahua.

English and I were sitting on his bed at one corner of the barrack room, rows of cots ranged each side of the wall and on these were the snoring men of the battery. The room was dimly illuminated by a candle on a shelf over English's head and another candle located on another shelf in the opposite corner of the room. There was a man in bed in a corner reading a newspaper by the feeble rays of the candle.

Suddenly we heard him growl and tear the page of the newspaper in half. His exclamation attracted my attention and I looked his way. His hair was closely cropped and his head, particularly his ears and forehead, and jaw, stamped him as a rough and ready fighter.

"That's Kid Ferguson, the pug," English whispered to me, and then in louder tones, he enquired, "What's eating on you, kid?"

"Aw, this bunk in the paper," replied Ferguson. Then he glared at me and enquired, "Did you write this stuff?"

"What stuff?" I replied. "Read it out."

Ferguson picked up the paper and began to read in mocking tones something that went as follows:

"Isn't it beautiful in the cold early dawn in France, to see our dear American soldiers get up from their bunks and go whistling down to the stables to take care of their beloved animals."

English laughed uproariously.

"The Kid don't like horses no more than I do," he said. "Neither one of us have got any use for them at all. And here, that's all they keep us doing, is tending horses. I went down there the other morning with a lantern and one of them long-eared babies just kicked it clean out of my hand. The other morning one of them planted two hoofs right on Ferguson's chest and knocked him clear out of the stable. It broke his watch and his girl's picture.

"You know, Mr. Gibbons, I never did have any use for horses. When I was about eight years old a horse bit me. When I was about fifteen years old I got run over by an ice-wagon. Horses is just been the ruination of me.

"If it hadn't been for them I might have gone through college and been an officer in this here army. You remember that great big dairy out on the edge of the town in El Paso? Well, my dad owned that and he lost all of it on the ponies in Juarez. I just hate horses.

"I know everything there is to know about an automobile. I have driven cross country automobile races and after we come out of Mexico, after we didn't get Villa, I went to work in the army machine shops at Fort Bliss and took down all them motor trucks and built them all over again.

"When Uncle Sam got into the war against Germany, this here Artillery Battalion was stationed out at Fort Bliss, and I went to see the Major about enlisting, but I told him I didn't want to have nothing to do with no horses.

"And he says, 'English, don't you bother about that. You join up with this here battalion, because when we leave for France we're going to kiss good-bye to them horses forever. This here battalion is going to be motorised.'

"And now here we are in France, and we still got horses, and they don't like me and I don't like them, and yet I got to mill around with 'em every day. The Germans ain't never going to kill me. They ain't going to get a chance. They just going to find me trampled to death some morning down in that stable."

Two or three of the occupants of nearby beds had arisen and taken seats on English's bed. They joined the conversation. One red-headed youngster, wearing heavy flannel underwear in lieu of pajamas, made the first contribution to the discussion.

"That's just what I'm beefing about," he said. "Here I've been in this army two months now and I'm still a private. There ain't no chance here for a guy that's got experience."

"Experience? Where do you get that experience talk?" demanded English. "What do you know about artillery?"

"That's just what I mean, experience," the red-headed one replied with fire. "I got experience. Mr. Gibbons knows me. I'm from Chicago, the same as he is. I worked in Chicago at Riverview Park. I'm the guy that fired the gattling gun in the Monitor and Merrimac show – we had two shows a day and two shows in the evening and – "

"Kin you beat that," demanded English. "You know, if this here red-headed guy don't get promotion pretty quick, he's just simply going to quit this army and leave us flat here in France facing the Germans.

"Let me tell you about this gattling gun expert. When they landed us off of them boats down on the coast, the battalion commander turned us all loose for a swim in the bay, and this here bird almost drowned. He went down three times before we could pull him out.

"Now, if they don't make him a Brigadier General pretty quick, he's going to get sore and put in for a transfer to the Navy on the grounds of having submarine experience. But he's right in one thing – experience don't count for what it should in the army.

"Right here in our battery we got a lot of plough boys from Kansas that have been sitting on a plough and looking at a horse's back all their lives, and they got them handling the machinery on these here guns. And me, who knows everything there is to know about machinery, they won't let me even find out which end of the cannon you put the shell in and which end it comes out of. All I do all day long is to prod around a couple of fat-hipped hayburners. My God, I hate horses."

But regardless of these inconveniences those first American artillerymen in our overseas forces applied themselves strenuously to their studies. They were there primarily to learn. It became necessary for them at first to make themselves forget a lot of things that they had previously learned by artillery and adapt themselves to new methods and instruments of war.

Did you ever hear of "Swansant, Kansas"? You probably won't find it on any train schedule in the Sunflower State; in fact, it isn't a place at all. It is the name of the light field cannon that France provided our men for use against the German line.

"Swansant, Kansas" is phonetic spelling of the name as pronounced by American gunners. The French got the same effect in pronunciation by spelling the singular "soixante quinze," but a Yankee cannoneer trying to pronounce it from that orthography was forced to call it a "quince," and that was something which it distinctly was not.

One way or the other it meant the "Seventy-fives" – the "Admirable Seventy-five" – the seventy-five millimetre field pieces that stopped the Germans' Paris drive at the Marne – the same that gave Little Willie a headache at Verdun, – the inimitable, rapid firing, target hugging, hell raising, shell spitting engine of destruction whose secret of recoil remained a secret after almost twenty years and whose dependability was a French proverb.

At Valdahon where American artillery became acquainted with the Seventy-five, the khaki-clad gun crews called her "some cannon." At seven o'clock every morning, the glass windows in my room at the post would rattle with her opening barks, and from that minute on until noon the Seventy-fives, battery upon battery of them, would snap and bark away until their seemingly ceaseless fire becomes a volley of sharp cracks which sent the echoes chasing one another through the dark recesses of the forests that conceal them.

The targets, of course, were unseen. Range elevation, deflection, all came to the battery over the signal wires that connected the firing position with some observation point also unseen but located in a position commanding the terrain under fire.

A signalman sat cross-legged on the ground back of each battery. He received the firing directions from the transmitter clamped to his ears and conveyed them to the firing executive who stood beside him. They were then megaphoned to the sergeants chief of sections.

The corporal gunner, with eye on the sighting instruments at the side of each gun, "laid the piece" for range and deflection. Number one man of the crew opened the block to receive the shell, which was inserted by number two. Number three adjusted the fuse-setter, and cut the fuses. Numbers four and five screwed the fuses in the shells and kept the fuse-setter loaded.

The section chiefs, watch in hand, gave the firing command to the gun crews, and number one of each piece jerked the firing lanyard at ten second intervals or whatever interval the command might call for. The four guns would discharge their projectiles. They whined over the damp wooded ridge to distant imaginary lines of trenches, theoretical cross-roads, or designated sections where the enemy was supposed to be massing for attack. Round after round would follow, while telephoned corrections perfected the range, and burst. The course of each shell was closely observed as well as its bursting effect, but no stupendous records were kept of the individual shots. That was "peace time stuff."

These batteries and regiments were learning gunnery and no scarcity of shells was permitted to interfere with their education. One officer told me that it was his opinion that one brigade firing at this schooling post during a course of six weeks, had expended more ammunition than all of the field artillery of the United States Army has fired during the entire period since the Civil War. The Seventy-five shells cost approximately ten dollars apiece, but neither the French nor American artillery directors felt that a penny's worth was being wasted. They said cannon firing could not be learned entirely out of a book.

I had talked with a French instructor, a Yale graduate, who had been two years with the guns at the front, and I had asked him what in his opinion was the most disconcerting thing that could happen to effect the morale of new gunners under actual fire. I wanted some idea of what might be expected of American artillerymen when they made their initial appearance on the line.

We discussed the effect of counter battery fire, the effect on gun crews of asphyxiating gas, either that carried on the wind from the enemy trenches or that sent over in gas shells. We considered the demoralising influences of aerial attacks on gun positions behind the line.

"They are all bad," my informant concluded. "But they are expected. Men can stand without complaint and without qualm any danger that is directed at them by the foe they are fighting. The thing that really bothers, though, is the danger of death or injury from their own weapons or ammunition. You see, many times there is such a thing as a faulty shell, although careful inspection in the munitions plants has reduced this danger to a percentage of about one in ten thousand.