These two benefactions, plus their tidal waves of enthusiasm, carried them through the herculean programme devised by General Bullard and the assisting French officers and troops.
They began, of course, with trench-digging, and followed with live grenades, machine-guns, automatic rifles, service-shells, bayonet work, infantry formation for attack, and gas tests. Then they were initiated into light and fire signals, star-shells, gas-bombing, and liquid fire.
Last, they came in on the rise of the wave of rifle popularity, and trained at it even more intensively than the first of the doughboys. "The rifle is the American weapon," was General Pershing's constant reiteration, "and it has other uses than as a stick for a bayonet."
But efficacious as schools of this type were, there was a need they did not meet, a need first practical, then sentimental, and equally valuable on both counts.
This was the training for the man from the ranks. The War College in America, acting in one of its rare snatches of spare time, had ordered a school for officers in America to which any enlisted man was eligible.
General Pershing overhauled this arrangement in one particular: he framed his school in France so that nothing lower than a corporal could enter it. This was on the theory that a man in the ranks who had ability showed it soon enough, and was rewarded by a non-com. rank. That was the time when the way ahead should rightfully be opened to him.
This school commenced its courses just before Christmas, with everything connected with it thoroughly worked out first.
The commissions it was entitled to bestow went up to the rank of major. Scholars entered it by recommendation of their superior officers, which were forwarded by the commanders of divisions or other separate units, and by the chiefs of departmental staffs, to the commander-in-chief. Before these recommendations could be made, the record of the applicant must be scanned closely, and his efficiency rated—if he were a linesman, by fighting quality, and if in training still or behind the lines, by efficiency in all other duties.
Then he entered and fared as it might happen. If he succeeded, his place was waiting for him at his graduation, as second lieutenant in a replacement division.
Enormous numbers of these replacement divisions had to be held behind the lines. From them, all vacancies occurring in the combat units in the lines were filled. And rank, within them, proceeded in the same manner as in any other division. Their chief difference was that there was no limit set upon the number of second lieutenants they could include, so that promotions waited mainly for action to earn them.