The War Department figures of the size of our army in France throughout 1918—which at the time could not be made public, because of military necessities—tell the story of its rapid growth. They show the number of Divisions in France and in line and in reserve to have been as follows:
| 1918 | In France | In Line and Reserve |
| April 1 | 10 | 3 |
| May | 13 | 4 |
| June | 16 | 6 |
| July | 24 | 9 |
| August | 32 | 20 |
| September | 37 | 25 |
| October | 40 | 31 |
| November | 42 | 30 |
This tabulation takes no count whatsoever of the noncombatants of the S. O. S.—as the army man knows the Service of Supplies—or the other great numbers of men employed in the rearward service of the United States Army. It is perhaps enough to say that the largest number of our troops employed in France was on September 26, the day that General Pershing began his Meuse-Argonne offensive. On that day our army consisted of 1,224,720 combatants and 493,764 noncombatants, a total of 1,718,484 men in its actual forces.
It is known now that if the war had continued we should probably have doubled those figures within a comparatively few months and should have had eighty Divisions in France by April, 1919, which would have made the United States Army by all odds the most considerable of any of the single belligerent nations fighting in France.
We have told elsewhere a little of the romance of the transport of our men; here in cold figures—statistics which scorn romance in their composition—is their result. We shall see through our Red Cross spectacles again and again the performances of that army, as the men and the women of the American Red Cross saw them.
In the meantime let us turn again, therefore, to Lieutenant Colonel Repington, whose reputation in this regard is well established, and find him saying of the commanding general of our army:
"To my mind, there is nothing finer in the war than the splendid good comradeship which General Pershing displayed throughout, and nothing more striking than the determined way in which he pursued the original American plan of making the American arms both respected and feared. The program of arrivals, speeded up and varied in response to the appeal of the Allies, involved him in appalling difficulties, from which the American army suffered to the last. His generous answer to cries for help in other sectors left him for long stretches almost, if not quite, without an army. He played the game like a man by his friends, but all the time with a singleness of purpose and a strength of character which history will applaud; he kept his eyes fixed on the great objective which he ultimately attained and silenced his detractors in attaining it. To his calm and steadfast spirit we owe much. To his staff, cool amidst the most disturbing events, impervious to panic, rapid in decision, and quick to act, the allied world owes a tribute. To his troops, what can we say? They were crusaders. They came to beat the Germans and they beat them soundly. They worthily maintained the tradition of their race. They fought and won for an idea."
Truer words have not been written. To one who has made even a superficial study of our army in France, the figure of the doughboy—the boy from the little home in Connecticut or Kansas or Oregon—looms large indeed. I did not, myself, see him in action. Other and abler pens have told and are still telling of his unselfishness, his audacity, his seemingly unbounded heroism both in the trenches and upon the open field of battle. The little rows of crosses in the shattered forest of the Argonne or upon the roads leading from Paris into Château-Thierry, elsewhere over the face of lovely France, tell the story of his sacrifice more graphically than any pen may ever tell it.
Frequently I have seen the doughboy in Paris as well as in the other cities and towns and in our military camps in France. He is an amusing fellow. One can hardly fail to like him. I have talked with him—by the dozens and by the hundreds. I have argued with him, for sometimes we have failed to agree. But I have never failed to sympathize, or to understand. Nor, as for that matter, to appreciate. No one who has seen the performance of our amazing army in France, or the immediate results of that performance, can fail to appreciate. If you are a finicky person you may easily see the defects that haste brought into the making of our expeditionary army—waste in material and in personnel here and there; but, after all, these very defects are almost inherent in any organization raised to meet a supreme emergency, and they appear picayune indeed when one places them alongside the marvel of its performance—when one thinks of Château-Thierry or Saint Mihiel or the Argonne.