THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORT
To attempt aid or comfort to a fighting army six hundred miles inland from the coast without adequate transportation was quite out of the question. Transportation, in fact and in truth, was the lifeblood of the American Expeditionary Forces which began to debark at the Atlantic rim of France before the summer of 1917 was well spent. It was the obvious necessity of transportation that made it necessary for the War Department of the United States to plan to operate an American railroad system of some 6,000 miles of line—all told about equal to the length of the Northern Pacific system—over certain designated portions of the several French railway systems. Nothing was ever more true than the now trite Napoleonic remark, that an "army travels on its stomach." The imperial epigram about the progress of an army meant transportation, and little else.
In other days in other wars the transport of the United States was in the completely adequate hands of its Quartermaster General and its Corps of Engineers. But in those days we fought our wars in North America. The idea of an army of two million men—perhaps even four or five million—fighting nearly four thousand miles away from the homeland was quite beyond our conception. When that remote possibility became fact the necessities of our transport multiplied a thousandfold. They swept even beyond the capabilities of a Quartermaster General and a Chief of Engineers who found their abilities sore-taxed in many other directions than that of the water, the rail, and the highway movement of troops. It became a job for railroad men, expert railroad men, the most expert railroad men in the world. And where might railroad men be found more expert than those of the United States of America?
Purposely I am digressing for the moment from the Red Cross's individual problem of transport. I want you to see for an instant and in the briefest possible fashion, the United States Military Railroad in France, not alone because it must form the real and permanent background of any study of the transportation of the American Red Cross—itself a structure of no little magnitude—but also because in turn the Red Cross was able to render a large degree of real service to the railroad workers who had come far overseas from Collingwood or Altoona or Kansas City to run locomotives or operate yards or unload great gray ships. No Red Cross canteens have been of larger interest than those which sprung up beside the tracks at Tours or Gièvres or Neufchâteau or St. Nazaire or Bassens—all of these important operating points along the lines of the United States Military Railroad in France.
To run this Yankee railroad across the land of the lily required, as already I have intimated, expert railroad mentality. To head it no less a man than W. W. Atterbury, operating vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was chosen and given the rank of brigadier-general in charge of the rail transport of the S. O. S., as the doughboy and commissioned officers alike have come to know the Service of Supplies of the American Expeditionary Forces. Around himself General Atterbury assembled a group of practical railroaders, men whose judgment and experience long since have placed them in the front rank of American transportation experts. Among these were Colonel W. J. Wilgus, former engineering vice-president of the New York Central system and the man who had made the first studies of the necessities and the possibilities of the United States Military Railroad in France; Colonel James A. McCrea, a son of the former president of the Pennsylvania and himself general manager of the Long Island Railroad at the time of our entrance into the war; Colonel F. A. Delano, a one-time president of the Wabash, who left a commissionership in the Federal Reserve Board to join the army, and Colonel G. T. Slade, former vice-president of the Northern Pacific. These men are only a few out of a fairly lengthy roster of our Yankee railroad men in France. Yet they will serve to indicate the type of personnel which operated our lines in France. It would not be fair to close this paragraph without a reference to the patent fact that the high quality of the personnel of the official staff of our Yankee railroad overseas was fully reflected in the men of its rank and file. These, too, were of the highest type of working railroaders, and to an American who knows anything whatsoever about the railroads of his homeland and the men who work upon them, more need not be said.
The United States Military Railroad in France, it should clearly be understood, was not a railroad system such as we build in America by patient planning and toil and the actual upturning of virgin soil. While many millions of dollars were expended in its construction, it was not, after all, a constructed railroad. In any legal or corporation sense it was not a railroad at all. It was in fact an adaptation of certain lines—side lines wherever possible—of long-existent French railways. To best grasp it, one must first understand that the greater part of French rail transportation is divided into five great systems. Four of these—the Nord, the Etat, the Paris-Lyons-Méditerranée, and the Orléans—shoot many of their main stems out from the heart of Paris, as the spokes of a wheel extend out from its hub. These spoke lines, if I may be permitted the phrase, long since were greatly overburdened with the traffic which arose from the vast army operations of the French, the British, and the Belgians. The problem was to make the French railway system bear upon its already much-strained back the additional transport necessities of our incoming army of at least two million men within the first twelve months of its actual operations.
Between the radiating spoke lines of the French railways leading out from the great hub of the wheel at Paris is a network of smaller and connecting lines, the most of them single-tracked, however. The whole structure, in fact, greatly resembles a huge spider's web; far more so than our own because of its more regular outlines. Colonel Wilgus and Colonel William Barclay Parsons, the designer of the first New York subway system, who accompanied him in the first inspection of the army transportation problem in France, quickly recognized this spider's web. And a little inspection showed them the great burden that its main spokes already were carrying; convinced them of the necessity of using other lines for the traffic of the American Army. For it was known even then that in addition to carrying the men themselves there would have to be some 50,000 tons a day transported an average distance of six hundred miles for an army of two million men.
To strike across the spider's web! That was the solution of the problem. Never mind if most of those cross-country connecting lines running at every conceivable angle to the main spoke lines and in turn bisecting the greater part of them, were for the most part single-tracked. Never mind if, as they began to climb the hills of Eastern France which held the eastern portions of the battle front—sectors assigned quite largely to the Americans—they attained one per cent grade or better. In the valley of the Loire where a good part of our military rail route would be located there is the easiest and steadiest long-distance grade in all France. With American ingenuity and American labor it would be comparatively easy to double track the single-track lines and in some cases even to lower the gradients, while, for that matter, the ingenuity of American locomotive builders might rise quite easily to the problem of producing an effective locomotive to overcome these one per cent pulls.
I have spoken of the valley of the Loire because almost from the beginning it was chosen as the location of the chief main routes of the United States Military Railroad in France. Necessity dictated that location. It was both logical and efficient that the British should be given the great Channel ports for their supply service of men and munitions. Their endeavors so crowded Havre and Boulogne and Dieppe and Calais and Cherbourg, to say nothing of the rail lines which serve these ancient ports of the north of France, that they were out of the question for any large movement of American forces, although, as we shall see in good time, much Red Cross material, particularly in the early stages of our participation in the war, did come through Havre.