More recently the railroads of the South have been called upon again to handle troops and munitions and commissary. Of course the problems that have confronted them upon the Mexican border are hardly comparable with those of the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. Yet on the very morning that the entire country was shocked by Villa’s audacious raid upon Columbus, New Mexico, the heads of the great railroad systems that come together at El Paso were alert and ready for any orders that the War Department might give. At 6:45 P.M. that evening a telegraphic request for trains came from Washington to the general headquarters of the Southern Pacific lines at Houston. Five thousand troops were to be moved from the camps at Galveston and near-by Texas City, and as quickly as possible. Early in the morning the trains began moving. The railroad had made a full night of it. Throughout the night they had brought their extra equipment into Galveston from San Antonio, from New Orleans, from Shreveport—every important operating center within twelve hours’ run. The trains were ready as quickly as the troops. And they made the long run of 881 miles up over the long single-track to El Paso in an average of thirty-six hours—under the conditions, a really remarkable performance.
THE RAILROAD “DOING ITS BIT”
Hauling a trainload of army trucks and supplies from Chicago to
Gen. Pershing’s expedition “somewhere in Mexico.”
The Santa Fé and the Rock Island operate direct lines from Chicago to El Paso. They were called upon during many months of the past year to carry munitions south to the border—particularly motor trucks—and were not found wanting. The Rock Island with its complementary line, the El Paso and Southwestern, carried 170 motor trucks and water wagons from Chicago to El Paso, 1,446 miles, on a fifty-hour schedule. The “limited” with all of its reputation for fast running and its high-speed equipment only makes this distance in forty-three hours and a half, while the ordinary schedule for freight—which is the equipment upon which it was necessary to handle the motor trucks and the water wagons—is 129 hours and 50 minutes from one city to the other. But Pershing needed the automobiles. They were vital for his expedition. And it was a part of the day’s work for the railroad to carry them down to the border in record time.[14]
The job of handling the troops on the Texas line has hardly been more than part of the day’s work. The railroaders down there will tell you that. The real job of the railroad recently has been laid overseas in the nations that are fighting so bitterly for mastery. The German military use of railroads is most interesting because it is the best. American travelers for years past have noticed upon the trucks of each separate piece of rolling stock in the Empire, its military destination, as well as cabalistic figures to denote its carrying capacity in men and horses and pounds of freight. Yet these were but the surface indications of a great plan—whose formulas had been worked out and rested on the shelves of the war headquarters in Berlin. How well the plan has worked we all know now. For the first time in its history the railroad has become an active fighting factor—not merely to be content with the bringing of powder and shell and food and equipment up to the bases of the fighting lines; not merely to assemble troops, in a comparatively leisurely fashion, or to take tired and sick and wounded men back to their homes; but to be a striking arm, if you please, moving whole brigades and even armies with all the tensity and speed and resource at its command. In other days you might laugh at the peaceful little German passenger train, making its leisurely way in all the pomp and circumstance that only an Empire may show. But you cannot laugh at the German military train, black with troopers, darting its way across the Kaiserland with a speed and definiteness that is all but human.
It has been stated that the real reason why the Germans failed to reach Paris in their memorable drive of September, 1914, was that even their remarkable system of military railroads failed in this supreme crisis. If this be so, it must be that the task placed upon them was superhuman. For it was just such military trains as we have just seen, multiplied in dozens and in hundreds, that moved whole brigades to southern Galicia during the first two weeks of April, 1915—a distance, roughly speaking, equal to that from Boston to Detroit. It was the military plan for the railroads of Germany that brought the regiments out of the trenches in Arras in the last week in June of that same year and on the Fourth of July had them hammering at the might of Warsaw. And Warsaw is 800 miles from the low fields of Arras. Not until the war is over will the whole military workings of the German railroads be known. But examples such as these show that they did work. And it may be remembered that when the German army began flowing in a tidal fashion up over the Russian steppes they came to von Hindenburg and reminded him of Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow. And von Hindenburg showed his great teeth and remarked that Napoleon had had no railroads.
“The bread which our soldiers eat today in Windau was baked yesterday in Breslau,” he added. And it takes only a single glance at the map to see that Windau is approximately 500 miles distant from Breslau. “We drink German mineral water and we eat fresh meat direct from Berlin. If necessary, we can build fifty miles of railroad in two days. Therefore it is nonsense to speak now of the times and the strategy of Napoleon.”