In place of tables of barrages, maps of trench sectors, photographs of combat areas, reports of hills and villages and lines of resistance taken, and the examination of prisoners, which formed the staple routine of a combat headquarters, there were tables of the daily amount of tonnage and the number of troops disembarked, maps of transportation systems and railroad yards, photographs of half-finished quays and vast piles of cargo, blue prints of the plans of a network of tracks running up to the doors of hospitals and warehouses, and reports from foresters getting out timber, from commanders of base sections and regulating stations.
One thing, however, Tours, Chaumont, and Souilly, and every other headquarters had in common. That was the call for more guns, rifles, clothing, shoes, machine-guns, ammunition, engineering tools, balloons, aeroplanes, ambulances, automobiles, motor-trucks, and other material, which was passed on from Souilly to Chaumont, from Chaumont to Tours, and then home. "We are sending them," home responded.
"But hurry!" Tours cried.
"Clear your ports," home replied.
"Stop wasting space! Fully load your ships," said Tours. "Equip the troops in the way we ask! Send things in the order we ask! Put them aboard with some kind of classification. Don't throw steel beams on top of automobile parts and chemical apparatus! Pack your sugar and flour in bags that don't tear open."
If there had been a long-distance telephone across the Atlantic, steam might have risen to the surface from the scorching messages; but the wires we had stretched from Paris to Chaumont and to Tours and to the coast were used with a prodigality which was an evidence of the distrust of our own postal system.
The barracks that had been turned into offices at Tours had office space equivalent to that of a New York "sky-scraper" or of the Army and Navy Building in Washington. A private was as distinguished a person in the streets of Tours as in the streets of Washington. Nowhere, not even in the ordnance department at home, were more leather puttees and boots with spurs circulating between offices to maintain liaison between the combat units and the business end of war than at the general offices of that huge corporation at Tours. The officers worked hard all day without feeling that they had accomplished anything like as much as they would have in their own occupation at home. They wondered sometimes why so many of them were there. Everyone was thinking how to secure material and labor, and everyone had a sense of struggling with his hands tied behind his back against walls of cotton wool. There was a pitiful look in their eyes as they stood before their senior officers, pleading for a chance to go to the front and fight. Was this sitting at your desk in your spurs going to war in France?
"Mother, take down your service flag, your son's in the S. O. S.," was the subject of a popular army song in France.
Not far from Tours was Blois—we shall have more to say about it—where officers whose seniors reported them unsatisfactory were re-classified and re-assigned. It was the channel of passage from the front to the S. O. S., and for officers in one branch of the S. O. S. who might do better in another. The danger of being sent to Blois was a shadow over every mind.
Where the fighters were "homesick," the able-bodied workers in the S. O. S. were "front-sick" and "heart sick." All their selfish interest centered in escaping the misfortune of having to return home without having heard a shot fired. If they did not do well, there was no chance of their reaching the front; if they did well, they became invaluable to a senior who refused to let them go. Their restlessness and their feeling of general helplessness in fits of despondency led to a few cases of suicide.