It required considerable research on the part of the Artillery Quartermaster to reveal all these facts. The electric lights had been unused for fifteen months when he arrived there, and he started to see what he could do to put the plant back to work. It required nothing less finally than a special action by the French Minister of War whereby orders were received by Monsieur X commanding him to leave his regiment at the front and go back to his plant by the riverside and start making electricity again.
With the lights on and water piped in for bathing facilities, and extensive arrangements made for the instalment of stoves and other heating apparatus, the purchase of wood fuel and fodder for the animals, the Brigade moved in and occupied the camp.
The American officer in command of that post went there as a Brigadier General. As I observed him at his work in those early days, I seemed to see in his appearance and disposition some of the characteristics of a Grant. He wore a stubby-pointed beard and he clamped his teeth tight on the butt end of a cigar. I saw him frequently wearing the $11.50 regulation issue uniform of the enlisted men. I saw him frequently in rubber boots standing hip deep in the mud of the gun pits, talking to the men like a father—a kindly, yet stern father who knew how to produce discipline and results.
While at the post, he won promotion to a Major General's rank, and in less than six months he was elevated to the grade of a full General and was given the highest ranking military post in the United States. That man who trained our first artillerymen in France was General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
Finding the right man for the right place was one of General March's hobbies. He believed in military mobilisation based on occupational qualifications. In other words, he believed that a man who had been a telephone operator in civilian life would make a better telephone operator in the army than he would make a gunner.
I was not surprised to find that this same worthy idea had permeated in a more or less similar form down to the lowest ranks in General March's command at that time. I encountered it one cold night in October, when I was sitting in one of the barrack rooms talking with a man in the ranks.
That man's name was Budd English. I met him first in Mexico on the American Punitive Expedition, where he had driven an automobile for Damon Runyon, a fellow correspondent. English, with his quaint Southwestern wit, had become in Mexico a welcome occupant of the large pyramidal tent which housed the correspondents attached to the Expedition. We would sit for hours hearing him tell his stories of the plains and the deserts of Chihuahua.
English and I were sitting on his bed at one corner of the barrack room, rows of cots ranged each side of the wall and on these were the snoring men of the battery. The room was dimly illuminated by a candle on a shelf over English's head and another candle located on another shelf in the opposite corner of the room. There was a man in bed in a corner reading a newspaper by the feeble rays of the candle.
Suddenly we heard him growl and tear the page of the newspaper in half. His exclamation attracted my attention and I looked his way. His hair was closely cropped and his head, particularly his ears and forehead, and jaw, stamped him as a rough and ready fighter.
"That's Kid Ferguson, the pug," English whispered to me, and then in louder tones, he enquired, "What's eating on you, kid?"