Our Army at the Front

just behind the fighting-lines. The handle reached back to the sea. Then, to the ruin of the simile, the artillery-schools, the aviatio

arly big cities to edge over to. In the main, the organizing staffs of the two nations could draw lines from

field-bases to those far in the rear. And because neither French train service nor Franco-American motor service could bear the giant burden of man-and-supply tran

ssimo Foch. Her plans were to put in a force which should be, as the English say of their flats, "self-contained." If this arrangement ha

ircumstances. Much of the American man-power eventually was brigaded with the British and French and went through the British and French soldier-making mills. But the territory marked America still remains America and the excellent showing made by the War Department in shipping men during the spring and early summer of 1918 furnished a supply of soldiers sufficient to make allotments to t

ill the needs. Later all the stevedores sent were regularly enlisted members of the army. While the great undertaking was still on paper and the tips of tongues, the infantry was beginning its hard lessons in the Vosges. The First Division was made up of something less than 50 per cent of experienced soldiers, although it was a regular army division. The leaven of learning was too scant. The rookies were all potentiality. The training was done with French soldiers and for the first little while under French officers. A division of Chasseurs Alpines was withdrawn from th

s not. Five feet of height is regarded as an abundance. He got his name of "p

roggy" with ever so definit

ry following them for half a day," sai

ks them over and decides they would be piffling on the march, forgets to see that they have the width of an opera-

e bayonet tip, and had heaved bombs by the afternoon, the d

wess of the French soldiers was one of the most important. But the soldiers' interpr

sideration. The valiant deeds of the French Army and the Allies, by which together they have successfully maintained the common cause for three years, and the sacrifices of the civil population of France in support of their armies command our profound respect. This can best be expressed on the part of our forces by uniform courtesies to all the French people, and by the faithful observance of their laws an

as a sort of intimation, on which they were to build their own conceptions of gallantry and good-will. Not only did they avoid doing damage to French property, t

ept them behind the lines at grenade practic

ade so much talk of. And by the time the war training was to begin, doughboys and Blue Devils tram

ves in. The method of training with the French was to mark a line where the trench should be, put the French at one end and the A

e first step of the Americans toward becoming professional. It was said of the Canadi

an obnoxious burden to the doughboy. The first marines who dug a trench with the Blue Devils found that their picks struck a stone at ev

ench to hide in. They were also to keep the aching backs and weary shoulders from getting overstiff. Toward the end of July the first batch of infantrymen were called off their trenches and were started at bomb practice. At first they used dummy bombs. The litt

When their turn came, the doughboys showed the Blue Devils the right way to throw a bomb. They lined them out with a ton of energy behind each throw, and the bombs went shooting stra

instructor. "You must land your bomb in the trenches-they do no more harm than wind w

d out, and the half-womanish, ha

ed some of the fun of a track meet. The French had odds on. No army has ever equalled them for accuracy of bomb-throwing, and the doughboys, once pried loose from their baseball advantage, were not in a position to push

he pleasant quality of being sentimentally correct, even if sharply reprehensible from the French point of view. It was, in brief, that the soldiers had

hrown, every other doughboy would straighten up in his trench to see what he had hit. Faces were nipped time and again by the fragments of fly

ducked as they were told, then popped up at once on one elbow to see what they could see. The Blue Devils training with them lay

and "act as if...." Then some of the wiseacres at the camp pronounced the conviction that the Americans thought the French were melodramatic, and by n

tern enlisted man before he left his own country. A melancholy relative had said, as he departed: "Are you ready to give your lif

he instructors ran afoul of their deepest convictions when they insisted

nch machine-gun and automatic rifle. The soldiers were taught to take both wea

t he found to his discomfiture that he had sprayed the hilltops instead of the range, and one of the officers

the machine-guns, even at first. The target was 200 metres away, at the foot of a

of this, but the men were kept at it

ed to train later troops in their turn, so that many lectures in war theory and science, and many demonstrations

in the most intensive methods in use in either French or British Army. It was an une