For the most part the United States accepted debentures rather than cash in payment for these supplies. It was obviously impossible to secure cash, for the small nations did not have any, and even France was skipping the interest payments on her five-billion-dollar debt to the United States. The American Government accepted treasury notes or other official securities at par, payable in three to five years with interest at 5 per cent. And, although such credits would have been heavily discounted in commercial centers, nevertheless America did not try to cover by charging high prices for the surplus stores or by exacting profits of any sort. The greater part of our supplies were sold at the cost of manufacture in the United States plus the cost of transportation to Europe, and plus nothing else. Consequently the sales proved to be a great stroke of advertising for the fair name of the United States.
Trainload after trainload of supplies sold in this fashion left the American depots during the spring and early summer of 1919; but still, when the bulk sale to France went through, these shipments had seemed to make scarcely any impression upon the mass of the surplus, so great had been the reserves created in France by American industry. The utilization value of the surplus army property in France was estimated at $1,000,000,000. Of this quantity, quartermaster stocks (not including animals) were valued at $670,000,000. Of this surplus an amount worth $87,000,000 (consisting principally of new clothing) was returned to the United States, and the rest, except what had been disposed of by individual sale, was turned over to the French Government, the final delivery being made on November 15, 1919.
None of these sales included the used supplies repaired and restored in the army salvage shops in France. Salvage was a new note amid the age-old wastefulness of war. After the great battles of the Civil War the countryside was littered with the débris of warfare. The bodies of men and animals were buried, and the soldiers did what they could to clean up by burning the refuse they could collect; but for the most part the disposition of muskets, sabers, cannon, harness, and clothing was left to the souvenir hunter and to the slow action of the elements. After our battles in the World War far more materials were left abandoned on the field than after any conflict of the Civil War, but these materials were picked up and reclaimed for such value as the Army could still get out of them. And the Army found that it could make valuable use of salvaged materials, and particularly of salvaged clothing. The savings wrought by salvage ran close to $150,000,000 in cash value, besides representing a great economy in the use of shipping space in the ocean transports.
Whereas, before the armistice, many of the recovered supplies went into the army stores for reissue, in 1919, when the A. E. F. was rapidly dwindling in size, the salvaged articles were sold, and principally to the French. All through France one could see peasants of both sexes wearing articles once of American army issue. Paris might dictate women’s styles to America; but Paris, Kentucky, where dwelt some of the seamstresses doing home work for the great army shirt factory at Jeffersonville, Indiana, had something to say about what French women wore. The French peasant woman wearing an American army shirt, with a bit of ribbon for a collar, was a common enough sight in some of the former American areas. Another familiar makeshift was the skirt made of an ex-army blanket. Even the dumps, on which were thrown materials of which the salvage shops could make no use, were carefully sorted over by the peasants, who sometimes trudged for miles with their carts in order to avail themselves of these opportunities.
Extensive commercial sales of salvaged materials were also made. Crushed tin cans sold by the ton as metal scrap. Rags went to the French paper makers and waste wool to the English textile mills. Grease, damaged oats, damaged flour, and worn rubber tires also went by sale. The Polish Army bought reclaimed American harness by weight. A large number of outer uniforms, having shrunk in sterilization so as to be too small for reissue, were dyed black and sold to the Belgian Relief Commission for wear by destitute civilians. Germans paid record prices for grease and other kitchen waste products. The salvage sales in 1919 brought in more than $4,000,000.
The horses and mules used by the A. E. F. were not included in the bulk sale of property to the French Government. The disposition of them (for few, if any, A. E. F. animals were returned to the United States) was a separate transaction, conducted almost entirely by the Remount Service of the A. E. F., a branch of the Quartermaster Corps. The A. E. F. acquired in all some 243,000 animals at a cost of $82,500,000. More than two-thirds of them were purchased abroad by the Americans. The mules numbered 61,000, and of these approximately half came from the United States, the rest principally from southern France and Spain. About 64,000 animals died in the service, and the rest were sold in Europe either to various governments or to civilians, the recovery from these sales being slightly more than $33,000,000. Thus the net war cost of the animals used by our forces in Europe was approximately $50,000,000.
With Americans the horse is (or is supposed to be) a single-purpose animal, used exclusively for his power of motivity, whether that power be exerted for speed or for pulling a load. To many Europeans he also possesses gastronomic value, and this fact enabled the Remount Service to get good prices for condemned horses from the expeditionary corrals. About 11,000 horses, broken down by service, were sold by the A. E. F. to French and German butchers, at an average price of $50 a head.
Because of the dearth of farm animals in France, the French Government offered no objection to the sale of the surplus horses and mules directly to private buyers. The chief condition made was that the animals must first be offered (at auction) to farmers whose horses had been requisitioned during the war. If these men would not offer satisfactory prices, then anyone was to be allowed to bid. Then the French Government arranged to take over 15,000 A. E. F. animals and dispose of them for the expedition. The prices obtained from the French Government under this arrangement were so much below what the A. E. F. was obtaining from its auctions that the United States Liquidation Commission sought and received authority to dispose of all the animals at auction. Because of the high taxes and auctioneers’ commissions, even the auction sale was not satisfactory; and the Remount Service asked permission to sell animals at private sale. This permission was never formally granted, but nevertheless the Remount Service went ahead and sold thousands of animals directly to buyers. The average price received from the French Government was $77.58 a head, whereas from the auction and direct sales to private purchasers the average price received was $201.65.
The French Government itself, by direct purchases from the A. E. F., took 50,000 animals at an average price of $190.21 a head. Thousands of surplus animals at good prices went to the governments of Belgium, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Bavaria. To civilians in France and Germany went 85,000 A. E. F. animals. Approximately the last of the original 243,000 had been sold when the final troops of the A. E. F. departed for the United States in the late summer of 1919.
Although we sent to France some of the finest mules in America (and, therefore, in the world), there was at first some difficulty in disposing of them to the French buyers. The farmers of southern France knew the mule and justly valued it, and during the early months of the demobilization a constant stream of American army mules went into that region for sale. Finally the southern French mule market became glutted, and then it became necessary to “sell” the mule to the farmers in the American areas in northern France. The French peasants did not hold the mule’s clouded ancestry against him, but what their thriftiness did object to was his dearth of hope of posterity. However, after a few of the peasants had bought and worked the army mules, the good qualities of the animal became widely advertised, and thousands of them thereafter were bought at good prices.