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economic and military coöperation. Arthur J. Balfour, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, headed the British mission. The eloquent René Viviani, former premier of France, was the spokesman of the French mission, and with him came Marshal Joffre, the hero of the Marne. The commissioners received an ovation in Congress and were enthusiastically welcomed by the municipal authorities and chambers of commerce in several of the great cities of the country. The plea of Viviani and Joffre, reënforced by Balfour, was that there should be no delay in sending our soldiers to France. The presence of even a few thousand men in the uniform of the United States would do more than all the millions of tons of food and munitions or the billions of dollars' worth of credits to make America's participation in the war seem like a reality and a harbinger of victory to the armies which had borne the incessant burden of war for thirtythree months. As a result of the plea the decision was made to begin the dispatch of an American Expeditionary Force (the A.E.F.) to France at once.

The man selected by President Wilson to command the A.E. F. was Major General John J. Pershing of Missouri, a magnificent type of American soldier-trim and straight, with clear, direct eyes, a firm jaw, and a quiet manner that gave assurance of vigor in action and power in reserve. General Pershing had a long and varied record of service. After his graduation from West Point in 1886, he had fought the Apaches in Arizona and the Sioux in Dakota. He had been military instructor at the University of Nebraska and had taken a degree in law. He had left his new appointment as instructor of tactics at West Point to enter the Spanish-American War, and had earned the rank of major of volunteers in the Santiago campaign. He had twice served in the Philippines-first as adjutant general of the department of Mindanao (1899-1903) and then as commander of the department and governor of the Moro province (1907-1913). In 1905, as military attaché to our embassy in Japan, he had been for several months with General Kuroki's army in Manchuria, "observing the first great war fought with modern arms." On his return to America he was promoted by

President Roosevelt from captain to brigadier general in the regular army, over the heads of eight hundred and sixty-two senior officers. He had commanded the punitive expedition against Villa in 1916 (p. 577); and when we declared war on Germany, he was a major general in command of all the American forces on the Mexican border. The instructions which General Pershing received from the War Department in May were to proceed with his staff officers to Europe, there "to command all the land forces of the United States operating in continental Europe and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; to establish, after consultation with the French War Office, all necessary bases and lines of communication, and make all the incidental arrangements essential to active participation at the front." The general and his staff reached England on the White Star steamer Baltic (June 8), and after a few days of lavish entertainment, including an audience with the king at Buckingham Palace, crossed to Paris, which, like London, was decked with the Stars and Stripes for their reception. Taking modest quarters on the left bank of the Seine, the general plunged immediately into the gigantic task of acquainting himself with the military and economic situation in the allied armies.

There were already a considerable number of Americans aiding the allied cause in France-aviators who had joined the Canadian Royal Fliers or the Lafayette Escadrille; drivers serving the two American ambulance associations which helped to carry back the French wounded from the front; doctors and nurses, who manned the hospitals which American donations had founded. But the uniforms of these volunteer workers did not have the letters U.S. on the collar. Therefore, when fifteen thousand American regulars of the First Division arrived at "a port in France" late in June, and a battalion of the 16th Regiment paraded through the streets of Paris on July 4, the joy of the Allies was full. America was really in the war. In August General Pershing established his headquarters at Chaumont, about fifty miles southeast of Toul, where the American troops were to have two months of intensive training in methods of trench warfare under the instruction of the French "chasseurs"

and artillery officers before going to their "quiet sector" at the front, between Verdun and Belfort. General Pershing had been instructed to coöperate in all ways with the allied military authorities, but to "reserve the identity of the United States force." His troops not being available for replacement service in the British and French armies, it was necessary to assign them to a sector of their own. The British naturally held the northern part of the line, with its railroad connections with the Channel ports. The French held the middle section, for the protection of Paris. There was no place for the Americans, therefore, except at the southern end of the line. Besides, since the attempt of the Germans to break through from Alsace in the early weeks of the war, there had been practically no fighting in this region. It was not until late in the spring of the next year that the American troops were called upon to take an active part in the war.

The assignment of the American troops to a sector below Verdun, as well as the British need for the facilities of the French ports on the Channel, made it most convenient for us to use the ports on the Bay of Biscay from Brest down to Bordeaux, for the debarkation of troops and food and war material. From these ports railroad lines ran to Tours, where General Pershing established headquarters for the commissary and quartermaster's departments, called the Service of Supply (the S.O.S.); and from Tours the line of communication ran eastward via Orléans and Troyes to Chaumont. There was an enormous amount of work to be done in dredging harbors, building piers, erecting warehouses and storage plants, running telegraph and telephone wires, laying spur tracks, and repairing and reënforcing the light railroads at various points to bear our heavy locomotives and cars. Indeed, Joffre had called for American engineers even before he called for American troops. England and France, by their network of railroads from the Channel ports and Paris, could get men and supplies to the front in a day, but we were obliged to maintain one of the longest lines of communication in the history of warfare. In the matter of clothing, for example, for every soldier at the front there had to

be "a three months' reserve in France, another two or three months' reserve in the United States, and a third three months' supply continuously in transit." By our fastest transports the average "turn round," or time taken to sail to France, discharge their troops, return and reload, was about a month; and the slower cargo ships, with their convoys, required from sixty-five to one hundred days, according to the weather and the nature of the cargo. The expense of maintaining this continuous flow of food and clothing to our soldiers overseas increased in geometrical progression with every increment of our army in France. When we finally had 2,000,000 "over there," it meant an immediate supply of 8,000,000 coats in order that each soldier might have a coat to his back. In addition, Mr. Hoover was asking us to send the allied armies hundreds of millions of bushels of cereals and vast quantities of sugar and potatoes; and the requisitions for locomotives, cars, motor trucks, horses and mules, telephone wire, pile drivers, concrete mixers, wrecking outfits, cranes, and tools of all sorts were incessant. Our lumbermen cut pine in the forests of France for warehouses, and spruce in the forests of Oregon for airplane propellers. Cantonments, training-schools, supply depots, and recreation huts were built along the lines of communication. Seventy American storage depots, clustered chiefly around St. Nazaire, Bordeaux, Tours, and Chaumont, dotted the map of France. Our noncombatant army of engineers, carpenters, masons, mechanics, truck drivers, and stevedores was equal to about one third of the fighting force, and there were tens of thousands of volunteer workers in the Red Cross, the "Y," the Knights of Columbus, and other welfare and relief organizations.

1 Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, chairman of the statistical branch of the General Staff, in his report to Secretary Baker, May 31, 1919, gives the following figures for clothing delivered to the army in the first fourteen months of the war: 131,800,000 pairs of woolen stockings, 168,600,000 pieces of underwear, 30,700,000 pairs of shoes, 26,500,000 flannel shirts, 21,740,000 breeches, 13,900,000 woolen coats, and 8,000,000 overcoats. The army purchased twice as many blankets in 1918 as the total number manufactured in this country in 1914. The cost of these articles of clothing alone was over $1,000,000,000, or an average of $500 for each soldier.

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From the Final Report of General John J. Pershing

THE AMERICAN BASE IN FRANCE

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