MAKING THE MEN WHO MAN THE GUNS
While our infantry perfected their training in the Vosges, the first American artillery in France undertook a schedule of studies in an old French artillery post located near the Swiss frontier. This place is called Valdahon, and for scores of years had been one of the training places for French artillery. But during the third and fourth years of the war nearly all of the French artillery units being on the front, all subsequent drafts of French artillerymen received their training under actual war conditions.
So it was that the French war department turned over to the Americans this artillery training ground which had been long vacant. Three American artillery regiments, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh, comprising the first U. S. Artillery Brigade, began training at this post.
The barracks had been long unoccupied and much preparatory work was necessary before our artillerymen could move in. Much of this work devolved upon the shoulders of the Brigade Quartermaster.
The first difficulty that he encountered was the matter of illumination for the barracks, mess halls and lecture rooms. All of the buildings were wired, but there was no current. The Quartermaster began an investigation and this was what he found:
The post had been supplied with electricity from a generating plant located on a river about ten miles away. This plant had supplied electrical energy for fifteen small French towns located in the vicinity. The plant was owned and operated by a Frenchman, who was about forty years old. The French Government, realising the necessity for illumination, had exempted this man from military service, so that he remained at his plant and kept the same in operation for the benefit of the camp at Valdahon and the fifteen small towns nearby.
Then the gossips of the countryside got busy. These people began to say that Monsieur X, the operator of the plant, was not patriotic, in other words, that he was a slacker for not being at the front when all of their menfolk had been sent away to the war.
Now it so happened that Monsieur X was not a slacker, and his inclination had always been to get into the fight with the Germans, but the Government had represented to him that it was his greater duty to remain and keep his plant in operation to provide light for the countryside.
When the talk of the countryside reached Monsieur X's ears, he being a country-loving Frenchman was infuriated. He denounced the gossips as being unappreciative of the great sacrifice he had been making for their benefit, and, to make them realise it, he decided on penalising them.
Monsieur X simply closed down his plant, locked and barred the doors and windows, donned his French uniform and went away to the front to join his old regiment. That night those villagers in the fifteen nearby towns, who had been using electrical illumination, went to bed in the dark.