When Harbord came to Tours, it was not by the way of Blois. He was no major-general of engineers or of the Q. M. C. who, however specially capable for his task, had not been in combat service. Here was Pershing's favorite adjutant, fresh from victories in the field, come back from the limelight at the front to help "count the beans and rustle freight." This of itself gave him a prestige that affected the state of mind of the whole organization. He must be a man of action; and the S. O. S. wanted action. He knew his regulars and his reserves, and Headquarters at Chaumont, and the needs of the army from ship's hold to the fox-holes. The business men in uniform, with U. S. R. on their collars, did not care whether or not their chief was a Catholic or a Presbyterian. A regular or a reserve? Was he the man?
He found the S. O. S. working in a series of compartments rather than departments. Though each was most conscientiously striving for coördination, different chiefs were in a mood that meant friction. Projects whose immediate completion was vital were not as far along as those whose completion could wait. Many were being constructed on too elaborate and lavish a scale by chiefs who had won a disproportionate amount of authority to carry out their ideas. They were enjoying the building of a plant that would last for twenty years, when the war might be won in another six months. Harbord did what Pershing would have done if the C.-in-C. had come to Tours; he was Pershing's man, as he had said. He grasped his problem, made his plan, and then set his adjutants to driving.
"The first time I went in to see Harbord," said one of them, "I knew that he knew his own mind, and that he was going to tell me what to do; and that I was going out to do it with the confidence that he would back me up. His 'no' to my suggestions was as convincing as his 'yes' that we were to have team-play—and that he was master."
His faculty of drawing men together was put in full play in some of the obvious methods of leadership which had been somewhat neglected in the S. O. S., where there had evidently been a policy that if you honestly follow the regulations all will come out well in the end. All the chiefs gathered at his house once a week for luncheon, where they found one another to be human. Instead of remaining at Tours, he left routine to his Chief of Staff, and spent three nights out of four on his railroad car in going and coming, with his office on board always in touch with Tours, while his inspections kept him informed of progress and aroused the enthusiasm of subordinates. The feeling passed that you were derelict if fate sent you to work in the S. O. S. The S. O. S. began to have the fighting spirit of corps of the front—that of an ambitious business concern. Harbord had not been a week in command before the S. O. S. was feeling a new force emanating from headquarters. They were calling to the fighters: "We're with you. Take more prisoners, so that we can set them to work. It means more supplies for you." That new commander who now had under him more than four hundred thousand men, and activities exceeding those of the largest of our trusts, would make every worker feel that he was contributing his part, not for his wage envelope, but for winning the war which had brought him to France.
Our cargo was now flowing into every one of the ports of France south of Cherbourg, and overflowing into Marseilles in the Mediterranean too. The less that had to go to Marseilles, the more shipping time would be saved from the longer trip through the Strait of Gibraltar. We Americans like competition. The different Atlantic ports were started on a "race to Berlin" unloading contest; the stevedores of the port which won would be the first to go home. No Americans in France were more homesick than our colored men. When one was asked whether he would rather work at Bordeaux than at Saint-Nazaire, he replied: "Is Bordeaux any nearer home?" The "rustling" of cargo now became a game in which joyous calls were heard in common urging against any shirking which might delay the return of the workers to the levees and the cotton fields of their own southland. In tune with the Herculean mechanical effort of the giant American cranes, their Herculean muscular effort in its impetuosity was in imminent danger of removing the stanchions from the ships as well as the cargo. A British skipper who thought that he would be two days in unloading, and found that only one day was required, returned home to say that he was lucky to escape without having his ship's plates torn off and started toward the front. When bags of sugar were piled so high on one dock that several tons went through the floor into the water, it was a tragedy to people on sugar rations at home and to the sugar-hungry men at the front, but in the fever of effort to win the war by supplying two million men with their requirements for battle it was only an incident of the wicked extravagance of war, which led one of the stevedores to say that the sugar must count in the record as cargo discharged, while he did not think that it would make that old sea that had made him seasick so much sweeter that you would notice it.
The impetus which the coming of Harbord gave to the S. O. S. implies no criticism of past accomplishment. His business was to "go through," as it had been at Belleau Wood and in the counter-offensive. An unfinished plant, preparing for an offensive in the spring of 1919, must be made equal to one in the fall of 1918. There had never been any lack of energy in the S. O. S. This was guaranteed by our national character, under the whip of war. All the while we had been making progress. The feeling of helplessness on the part of the workers had been due to ambition thwarted in gaining the full results of the supreme efforts which they were eager to exert. There had been no cessation of building; no cessation in striving to find in Europe every available article which would save transport, without reference to the cost—cost being the one thing that never made us hesitate. Every man accepted the idea that all the money in the world was ours.
There was already an end to the confusion of the early days when the parts of a piece of machinery arrived on different ships. Tables of priority for each month were sent ahead to Washington, which might well think that the A. E. F. considered that the War Department had the magical power of pulling anything that it required out of a hat. Instead of sending his requisitions for material through Chaumont, Harbord now sent them direct to the War Department; he was the great administrative agent for the chief of G-4 at Chaumont, who coördinated combat and supply, holding the balance between the demands of the front and the wherewithal to meet them. There was increasing coördination at home, too, under the indomitable authority of General March.
The wedges which our divisions were driving down the walls of the Aire and the Meuse rivers and against the Kriemhilde Stellung were only a part of the giant wedge of the supply system, with its bases as broad as the United States, which narrowed to the breadth of the Atlantic Coast of France from Brest to Bordeaux. Most of our troops arrived at Brest, where the harbor was deep enough for the draught of the mighty German liners which had been transformed into transports. Navy blue and army khaki swarmed on the docks where our sea and land forces met. Our destroyers sped out of the harbor to disappear on the horizon, and reappear as the protective scurrying guards of the transports which they brought safe into port before they slipped out to sea again, to see more freighters safe through the submarine zone under their agile husbanding.
During the height of that transatlantic excursion season of ours the men on board slept in three shifts of eight hours each; they had two meals a day. Their warm bodies were close-packed, breathing into one another's faces, in tiers of low-ceilinged rooms, for from seven to ten days, after the healthy life of the training camps which had accustomed their lungs to fresh air. When the transport passed into the harbor mouth, and the submarine danger was over, as ants might swarm out of their runways to the top of a hill they swarmed on deck, where first- and second-class passengers had sauntered and promenaded, in solid masses of khaki, who formed the most valuable and superior first-class passengers America had ever sent to Europe. They had arrived. They made the harbor echo with calls and hurrahs. Theirs had been a passage which money could not buy or would want to buy for more than one experience; a passage not for pay or adventure, whose glamour was a sight of the sea and of France and of all they had read about the war. They were man-power, man-power by its thousands and millions, formed in a common mold no less than egg-grenades, their clothes cut according to the same pattern no less than their gas masks, the man-power which we had to give if we did lack artillery and aeroplanes, automata who were sentient parts of a machine responding to the mechanism of orders rather than of levers. Equipped, disciplined, trained, hardened, the preparatory processes of the training camps sent them to us for the final processes in France.