Each mess hall at Brest was operated on the cafeteria plan. Each was equipped to feed 20,000 soldiers. The men entered the hall marching in column of squads. They passed through the galleys, filling their kits with hot food, then secured places at the tables, ate, and left the hall at the opposite end, where there were refuse cans in which to scrape off their dishes and also tanks of boiling, soapy water and hot rinsing water. Here they cleaned their equipment. The facilities were such that each kitchen could serve a brigade of troops entering the building at the ordinary marching pace. Frequent inspections kept the food up to standard. The camps at Brest also maintained night soup stands at which any soldier could get bread and hot soup between the hours of 8:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. The force that operated the messing facilities at Brest numbered 1,600 officers and men.
At Bordeaux the troops temporarily occupying the embarkation camps cooked their own meals at the mess halls, drawing their supplies from the camp organization. At St. Nazaire the messes were similar to those at Brest. The old army transport McClellan, which had crossed to France in the first American convoy in 1917, was stationed at St. Nazaire, where it served the subsistence organization as a floating refrigerator with capacity for 3,000,000 pounds of food. The McClellan was too old to stand the buffeting of the North Atlantic, and the Embarkation Service, unwilling to risk bringing her home, turned the ship over to the A. E. F. After the expedition had returned to the United States the Government sold the McClellan to France.
To the individual soldier, quite the most important branch of the embarkation organization was that one which paid the money due him from the Government. It paid him his money in francs, either in the currency itself or by check, and then saw to it that he exchanged his French money for its equivalent in American currency. Both of these enterprises in finance—disbursement and exchange—were in the hands of the A. E. F. Quartermaster Corps. The disbursement offered little difficulty, although the monthly pay roll at Brest sometimes contained as many as 100,000 names, while those at St. Nazaire and Bordeaux were proportionately large. The question of foreign exchange presented more of a problem.
Soon after the van of the A. E. F. reached France the Treasury Department at Washington requested the War Department to pay all its troops on foreign soil in the money of the country in which they chanced to be stationed. This meant that most of the men of the expedition received their pay in francs. Before the armistice, questions of currency exchange were of slight concern to the overseas soldier. After the Government had deducted his allotment to his dependents, his monthly premium payment for war risk insurance, and his partial payment for any Liberty Bonds he might have purchased through the Army, there was not much left for him, anyhow. When francs were cheaper he received more of them from the pay officer than he had expected, but as long as he stayed in France and spent his money there the rate of exchange made little difference to him.
French exchange continually strengthened during the sojourn of the expedition in France—until after the armistice began. The normal value of francs is 5.18 to the dollar. In July, 1917, the rate was 5.70. This rate gradually improved until at its strongest point it stood at 5.45. The few wounded men and casuals returning to the United States during this period were thus able to benefit financially by exchanging their French savings for American currency.
After the armistice, however, and during the very time the expeditionary troops were returning to the United States in greatest numbers, the exchange value of the franc slumped badly. Shortly after November 11, 1918, the rate was 5.80 to 1. It continued to fall steadily until in the autumn of 1919 it took 9.70 francs to purchase one dollar. It follows that the provident soldier who had saved the francs paid to him on a basis of less than six to the dollar lost heavily when he was forced to convert his savings back into dollars again on a basis of nearly ten francs to the dollar. The loss was particularly heavy upon officers who maintained drawing and savings accounts in French banks or who had not cashed their pay checks. Sometimes, too, officers lost their checks. Later they obtained duplicates, which the declining exchange had made less valuable. The War Department considered itself bound to protect soldiers from losses on this account. Congress is now considering a war department bill which, if enacted into law, will provide for the reimbursement of losses incurred by soldiers because of variations in foreign exchange.
It was good financial policy for the A. E. F. to leave all its French currency behind as it embarked for the United States, and to bring home only American money. Yet it would have resulted in confusion in the A. E. F. finances to have changed the pay system at the ports of embarkation. Therefore the Quartermaster Corps did the next best thing: it paid off the embarking troops in francs as usual and then immediately converted their francs into American currency. Since both payment and exchange were at the same rate of exchange, there was no loss to the troops in this transaction.
In order to provide the American money for this exchange it was necessary for the Treasury to ship to France great quantities of currency. It took the A. E. F. some time to convince the Treasury Department of the necessity for such shipments. The day after the armistice began, the command of the A. E. F. cabled to the Treasury requesting the immediate shipment of $500,000 in currency, an order afterwards increased to $2,000,000. This money did not actually reach the A. E. F. until the last day of January, 1919. By that date the expedition was beginning to embark rapidly. There was not enough American currency in Europe to buy all the French money of the expeditionary troops, and only by the most strenuous efforts could the Quartermaster Corps provide money for exchange until the first shipment of currency arrived from the United States. Finance officers were stationed in Paris, London, and at the principal seaports with orders to buy all the American money they could secure. By combing the banks and the countingrooms of brokers and by maintaining in Paris a fund from which shipments were rushed by motor convoys to the ports as these exhausted their supplies of currency, the Corps managed to keep the exchange system running. After the January shipment of $2,000,000 the Treasury Department arranged for an automatic supply of $10,000,000 every month.
Meanwhile, at the ports the Corps had built up the exchange plan. Booths were set up on all docks, and a force of disbursing quartermasters was organized to go on board all transports and exchange the money of soldiers who had failed to make the exchange on shore. The A. E. F. passed an order making it compulsory for all soldiers to exchange their cash before sailing. Notices to this effect were posted conspicuously in all the embarkation camps. In the larger units the officers attended to the matter, collecting the French money from their men, receiving American money for it from the exchange officers, and then distributing the familiar currency among the troops. Individuals and men traveling in small units attended to their own exchange. The quartermasters at Brest distributed as much as $400,000 in American currency in a single day. Up to July 1 Brest had paid out $60,000,000 in American money to troops boarding ship there.
By the late spring of 1919 most of the combat divisions, except those on active duty with the Army of Occupation, had crossed the ocean or had started for home. By that time the facilities at the base ports had been developed to a capacity that enabled them to handle all further embarkations, and the command of the expedition closed and abandoned the embarkation center at Le Mans. All of the physical equipment there went to the French Government under the terms of the general sale consummated in August of that year. On June 30 Bordeaux was closed as a port of embarkation. It had embarked 258,000 troops. St. Nazaire officially ceased to exist as a port of embarkation on July 26, although thereafter it embarked a few casuals. Approximately 500,000 American soldiers said farewell to France at St. Nazaire.