And they thought we wouldn't fight

Many of them were very old men. They had thick black eyebrows and wore long black beards. They were tired, weary men. We had seen them in the camions, each man resting his head on the shoulder of the man seated beside him. The dust of the journey turned their black beards grey. On the front seat of the camion a sleepless one handled the wheel, while beside him the relief driver slept on the seat.

Thus they had been seen, mile upon mile of them, thousand upon thousand of them, moving ever up and down those roads that paralleled the six hundred and fifty miles of front from Flanders to the Alps – moving always. Thus they had been seen night and day, winter and summer, for more than three long years, always trying to be at the place where the enemy struck. The world knows and the world is thankful that they always were there.

It was under such veteran instructors as these that our first Americans in France trained, there, in the Vosges, in a garden spot of beauty, in the province that boasts the birthplace of Jeanne d'Arc. On the few leave days, many of our men, with permission, would absent themselves from camp, and make short pilgrimages over the hills to the little town of Domremy to visit the house in which the Maid of Orleans was born.

Our men were eager to learn. I observed them daily at their training tasks. One day when they had progressed as far as the use of the New French automatic rifles, I visited one of the ranges to witness the firing.

Just under the crest of the hill was a row of rifle pits, four feet deep in the slaty white rock. On the opposite hill, across the marshy hollow, at a distance of two hundred yards, was a line of wooden targets, painted white with black circles. Poised at intervals on the forward edge of the pits were a number of automatic rifles of the type used by the French army. An American soldier and a French soldier attended each one, the former in the firing position and the latter instructing.

The rear bank of the pits was lined with French and American officers. The order, "Commence firing," was given, and white spurts of rock dust began dancing on the opposite hill, while splinters began to fly from some of the wooden targets.

At one end of the firing trench a raw American recruit, who admitted that he had never handled an automatic rifle before, flushed to his hat-brim and gritted his teeth viciously as his shots, registering ten feet above the targets, brought forth laughter and exclamations from the French soldiers nearby. He rested on his gun long enough to ask an interpreter what the Frenchmen were talking about.

"They say," the interpreter replied, "that you belong to the anti-aircraft service."

The recruit tightened his grip on his rifle and lowered his aim with better results. At the end of his first fifty shots he was placing one in three on the target and the others were registering close in.

"Bravo!" came from a group of French officers at the other end of the trench, where another American, older in the service, had signalised his first experiences with the new firearm by landing thirty targets out of thirty-four shots, and four of the targets were bull's-eyes. The French instructors complimented him on the excellence of his marksmanship, considering his acknowledged unfamiliarity with the weapon.

Further along the depression, in another set of opposing trenches and targets, a row of French machine guns manned by young Americans, sprayed lead with ear-splitting abandon, sometimes reaching the rate of five hundred shots a minute. Even with such rapidity, the Americans encountered no difficulties with the new pieces.

French veterans, who for three years had been using those same guns against German targets, hovered over each piece, explaining in half French and half English, and answering in the same mixture questions on ways and means of getting the best results from the weapons.

Here a chasseur of the ranks would stop the firing of one American squad, with a peremptory, "Regardez." He would proceed with pantomime and more or less connected words, carrying the warning that firing in such a manner would result in jamming the guns, a condition which would be fatal in case the targets in the other trenches were charging upon the guns.

Then he showed the correct procedure, and the Yanks, watchfully alert to his every move, changed their method and signified their pleasure with the expression of "Trays beans," and "Mercy's."

"Do you think it would have resulted in a quicker and possibly more understanding training if these Americans were instructed by British veterans instead of French?" I asked an American Staff Officer, who was observing the demonstration.

"I may have thought so at first," the officer replied, "but not now. The explanations which our men in the ranks are receiving from the French soldiers in the ranks are more than word instructions. They are object lessons in which gesticulation and pantomime are used to act out the movement or subject under discussion.

"The French are great actors, and I find that American soldiers unacquainted with the French language are able to understand the French soldiers who are unacquainted with the English language much better than the American officers, similarly handicapped, can understand the French officers.

"I should say that some time would be lost if all of our troops were to be trained by French soldiers, but I believe that this division under French tutelage will be better able to teach the new tactics to the new divisions that are to follow than it would be if it had speedily passed through training camps like the British system, for instance, where it must be taken for granted that verbal, instead of actual, instruction is the means of producing a speeding up of training."

Thus it was that our first American contingent in France was in training for something more than service on the line. It rapidly qualified into an expert corps from which large numbers of capable American instructors were later withdrawn and used for the training of our millions of men that followed.

This achievement was only accomplished by the exercise of strict disciplinarian measures by every American officer in the then small expedition. One day, in the early part of August, 1917, a whirlwind swept through the string of French villages where the first contingent was training.

The whirlwind came down the main road in a cloud of dust. It sped on the fleeting tires of a high-powered motor which flew from its dust-grey hood a red flag with two white stars. It blew into the villages and out, through the billets and cook tents, mess halls, and picket lines. The whirlwind was John J. Pershing.

The commander-in-chief "hit" the training area early in the morning and his coming was unannounced. Before evening he had completed a stern inspection which had left only one impression in the minds of the inspected, and that impression was to the effect that more snap and pep, more sharpness and keenness were needed.

At the conclusion of the inspection all of the officers of the contingent were agreeing that the whirlwind visitation was just what had been needed to arouse the mettle and spirit in an organisation comprised of over fifty per cent. raw recruits. Many of the officers themselves had been included in the pointed criticisms which the commander directed against the persons and things that met disfavour in his eyes.

The night following that inspection or "raid," as it was called, it would have been safe to say that nowhere in the area was there a recruit who did not know, in a manner that he would not forget, the correct position of a soldier – the precise, stiff, snappy attitude to be presented when called to attention. The enlisted men whose heels did not click when they met, whose shoulders slouched, whose chins missed the proper angle, whose eyes were not "front" during the inspection, underwent embarrassing penalties, calculated to make them remember.

"Have this man fall out," General Pershing directed, as he stood before a recruit whose attitude appeared sloppy; "teach him the position of a soldier and have him stand at attention for five minutes."

One company which had prided itself upon having some of the best embryonic bomb-throwers in the contingent, contributed a number of victims to the above penalties, and as the General's train of automobiles swirled out of the village, the main street seemed to be dotted with silent khaki-clad statues doing their five minute sentences of rigidity.

"What about your men's shoes?" General Pershing asked a captain sharply, while he directed his eyes along a company line of feet whose casings seemed to be approaching the shabby.

"We need hobnails, sir," replied the captain.

"Get them" – the words snapped out from beneath Pershing's close-cropped grey moustache. "Requisition hobnails. Your men need them. Get them from the quartermaster."

The American commander stepped into the darkness of a large stone-walled stable, which represented the billeting accommodations for ten American soldiers. A dog curled in the doorway growled and showed its teeth. The General stepped past the menacing animal, and without heeding its snarls close to his heels, started questioning the sergeants in charge.

"Are any cattle kept in here?" he asked.

"No, sir," replied the sergeant.

"Detail more men with brooms and have it aired thoroughly every day."

Observed from a distance, when he was speaking with battalion and regimental commanders, the commander manifested no change of attitude from that which marked his whole inspection. He frequently employed his characteristic gesture of emphasis – the wadding of his left palm with his right fist or the energetic opening and closing of the right hand. When the Pershing whirlwind sped out of the training area that night, after the first American inspection in France, it left behind it a thorough realisation of the sternness of the work which was ahead of our army.

The development of a rigid discipline was the American commander's first objective in the training schedules which he ordered his staff to devise. After this schedule had been in operation not ten days, I happened to witness a demonstration of American discipline which might be compared to an improved incident of Damocles dining under the suspended sword at the feast of Dionysius.

A battalion of American Infantry was at practice on one of the training fields. The grenade-throwing exercises had been concluded and the order had been given to "fall in" preparatory to the march back to the camp.

Upon the formation of the long company lines, end on end down the side of the hill, the order, "attention," was sharply shouted bringing the men to the rigid pose which permits the eyes to wander neither to the right nor to the left, above nor below, but straightforward.

As the thousand men stood there, rigid and silent, a sudden disturbance took place in the sky above them. Shells began exploding up there. At the same time the men in the ranks could distinctly hear the whirr and the hum of aeroplane motors above them.

Almost every day reports had been received that German planes had evaded the Allied aerial patrols along the front and had made long flights behind our lines for the dual purposes of observing and bombing.

As the American battalion stood stiff and motionless, I knew that the thought was passing through the minds of every man there that here, at last, was the expected visitation of the German flyers and that a terrific bomb from above would be the next event on the programme. The men recognised the reports of the anti-aircraft guns blazing away, and the sound of the motors suggested a close range target.

The sound seemed to indicate that the planes were flying low. The American ranks knew that something was going on immediately above them. They did not know what it was, but it seems needless to state that they wanted to know. Still the ranks stood as stiff as rows of clay-coloured statues.

An almost irresistible impulse to look upward, a strong instinctive urging to see the danger that impended, and the stern regulations of "eyes front" that goes with the command "attention," comprised the elements of conflict that went on in each of the thousand heads in that battalion line.

In front of each platoon, the lieutenants and captains stood with the same rigid eyes front facing the men. If one of the company officers had relaxed to the extent of taking one fleeting upward glance, it is doubtful whether the men could have further resisted the same inclination, but not a man shifted his gaze from the direction prescribed by the last command.

One plane passed closely overhead and nothing happened. Three more followed and still no bombs fell, and then the tense incident was closed by the calling out of the order of the march and, in squads of four, the battalion wheeled into the road and marched back to billets.

As one company went by singing (talking was permitted upon the freedom of routstep), I heard one of the men say that he had thought all along that the officers would not have made them stand there at attention if the danger had not been over.

"As far as I knew, it was over," a comrade added. "It was right over my head." And in this light manner the men forgot the incident as they resumed their marching song.

When Mr. W. Hollenzollern of Potsdam put singing lessons in the curriculum of his soldiers' training, a tremor of military giggling was heard around the world. But in August, 1914, when Mars smiled at the sight of those same soldiers, marching across the frontiers east, south and west, under their throaty barrage of "Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles," the derisive giggles completely died out. It immediately became a case of he who laughs first, lives to yodel.

The American forces then in training took advantage of this. They not only began to sing as they trained, but they actually began to be trained to sing. Numerous company commanders who had held strong opinions against this vocal soldiering, changed their minds and expressed the new found conviction that the day was past when singing armies could be compared solely with male coryphées who hold positions well down stage and clink empty flagons of brown October ale.

"It's a great idea," a company commander told me. "We learned it from the Blue Devils. They are the toughest set of undersized gentry that I have run into in France. They have forearms as big as three-inch shells, and as hard. Their favourite pastime is juggling hand-grenades that can't possibly explode unless they just lightly touch one another.

"Yesterday we watched them, bared to the waist, as they went through three hours of grenade and bombing practice that was the last word in strenuosity. Keeping up with their exercises was hard work for our men, whose arms soon began to ache from the unaccustomed, overhand heaving.