Our Army at the Front

by Heywood Broun

It must be understood that all this applies only to men and not in the least to guns. For big guns, the American reliance was wholly upon France and England, upon the invitation of those two countries when America entered the war.

And the readiness of America's men was not due to a large preparation in artillery as such. The blessing arose from the fact that the coast defense could be diverted, within the first year of war, to the handling of the big guns for land armies, and thus strengthen the artillery arm sent to France for final training.

Artillery was every country's problem, even in peace-times. It was the service which required the greatest wealth and the most profound training. There was no such thing as a citizenry trained to artillery. Mathematics was its stronghold, and no smattering could be made to do. Even more than mathematics was the facility of handling the big guns when mathematics went askew from special conditions.

These things the coast defense had, if not in final perfection, at least in creditable degree. And the diversion of it to the artillery in France stiffened the backbone of the Expeditionary Force to the pride of the force and the glad amazement of its preceptors.

One other thing the coast defense had done: it had pre-empted the greater part of America's attention in times of peace and unpreparedness, so that big-gun problems had received a disproportionate amount of study. The American technical journals on artillery were always of the finest. The war services were honeycombed with men who were big-gun experts.

So when the first artillery training-school opened in France, in mid-August of 1917, the problems to be faced were all of a more or less external character.

The first of these, of course, was airplane work. The second was in mastering gun differences between American and French types, and in learning about the enormous numbers of new weapons which had sprung from battle almost day by day.

The camp, when the Americans moved in, had much to recommend it to its new inhabitants. There need be no attempt to conceal the fact that first satisfaction came with the barracks, second with the weather, and only third with the guns and planes.

Some of the artillerymen had come from the infantry camps, and some direct from the coast. Those from the Vosges camp were boisterous in their praise of their quarters. They had brick barracks, with floors, and where they were billeted with the French they found excellent quarters in the old, low-lying stone and brick houses. The weather would not have been admired by any outsider. But to the men from the Vosges it owed a reputation, because they extolled it both day and night. The artillery camp was in open country, to permit of the long ranges, and if it sunned little enough, neither did it rain.

The guns and airplanes supplied by the French were simple at first, becoming, as to guns at least, steadily more numerous and complicated as the training went on.