BOOK VII.
THE SIGNAL CORPS.
CHAPTER I.
SIGNAL CORPS MATERIAL.
The spent runner who hurled himself through the gate of ancient Athens and with his dying breath gasped out the news of the brilliant success of the Athenian troops against the Persian at Marathon in the year 490 B. C. was the first famous soldier of a signal corps; but since then the exploits of the bearers of military tidings have filled the pages of legend and story. Just as other branches of military science have been brought to a high perfection in modern times, so in equal degree has the art of military signaling progressed in efficiency.
Where the ancient athlete once exhausted his strength in bearing military messages long distances in the field, the modern Mercury uses the wireless phone. In Civil War days the pony express rider brought from some desperate stand the story of the lack of ammunition; to-day the ammunition-supply organization is in constant touch with the front by means of telegraph or the long-distance telephone. In the Indian campaigns in our own West messages from beleaguered parties were sometimes conveyed by signal smokes; the "lost battalion" in the Argonne sent news of its plight by carrier pigeon.
Modern warfare has indeed retained the old, but it has also developed the new, in transmitting military tidings. So important is this branch of fighting that it is put in the hands of a specialized organization, which in the American Army is known as the Signal Corps. The Signal Corps not only had charge of the operation of the various communicating devices in 1917 and 1918 in the field of operations (except latterly in the air), but it also had charge of the manufacture of the equipment for this work.
The production of signaling equipment was far greater than the uninformed person would imagine. As an instance, there was one special type of telephone wire, a form unknown to commercial use before the war, which, before November 11, 1918, was being produced at the rate of 20,000 miles a month, at a cost of $5,650,000 per month, requiring the complete capacity of the day and night operation of all fine wire machinery in the United States, except that which was working on Navy contracts. Many other production activities of the Signal Corps were carried through on a similar scale.
Until after the Civil War, the operation of large units of troops was greatly handicapped by the limitations of military signaling as then known. A force could not be effective in combat that could not be readily reached in all quarters by runners or riders or by visual signals. The development of the telegraph and telephone and the invention of radio changed all this, so that in the great war armies stretched out on fronts 100 miles or more in length with every part of them in immediate touch with every other part through the exact and complete systems of signaling on the field.