The organized recreation and the competitions, two sturdy British expedients for morale, always came just after these grimmest of all of war's practices. The more foolish the game, the more rapturously the British joined in it. Red Rover and prisoner's base were two prime favorites. A British major said the British Army had discovered that when the men came out of the trenches, fagged and horror-struck, the surest way to bring them back was to set them hard at playing some game remembered from their childhood.
The British had even harder work, at first, to make the men fall in with the games than they had with war practice. But the friendly spirit existing basically between English and Americans, however spatty their exterior relationships may sometimes be, finally got everybody in together. The Americans found that a British instructor would as lief call them "rotten" if he thought they deserved it, but that he did it so simply and inoffensively that it was, on the whole, very welcome.
So the Americans learned all they could from French and British, and began the scheme of turning back on themselves, and doing their own instructing.
The infantry camp was destined to have some offshoots, as the number of men grew larger, and the specialists required intensive work. Officers' schools sprang up all over France, and all the supplemental forces, which had infantry training at first, scattered off to their special training, notably the men trained to throw gas and liquid fire.
But, for the most part, the camp in the Vosges remained the big central mill it was designed to be, and in late October, when three battalions put on their finishing touches in the very battle-line, the cycle was complete. Before the time when General Pershing offered the Expeditionary Force to Generalissimo Foch, to put where he chose, the giant treadway from sea to camp and from camp to battle was grinding in monster rhythms. It never thereafter feared any influx of its raw material.
CHAPTER VIII
BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS
THE American Expeditionary Force which went into the great training-schools of France and England was like nothing so much as a child who, having long been tutored in a programme of his own make, an abundance of what he liked and nothing of what he didn't, should be thrust into some grade of a public school. He would be ridiculously advanced in mathematics and a dunce at grammar, or historian to his finger-tips and ignorant that two and two make four. He would amaze his fellow pupils in each respect equally.
And that was the lot of the Expeditionary Force. The French found them backward in trench work and bombing, and naturally enough expected that backwardness to follow through. They conceded the natural quickness of the pupils, but saw a long road ahead before they could become an army. Then the Americans tackled artillery, hardest and deepest of the war problems, and suddenly blossomed out as experts.
Of course, the analogy is not to be leaned on too heavily. The Americans were not, on the instant, the arch-exponents of artillery in all Europe. But it is true that in comparison to the size of their army, and to the extent to which they had prepared nationally for war, their artillery was stronger than that of any other country on the Allied side at the beginning of the war, notwithstanding that it was the point where they might legitimately have been expected to be the weakest.
Hilaire Belloc called the American artillery preparation one of the most dramatic and welcome surprises of the war.