Our Army at the Front - Heywood Broun

All of which is to say that Newton D. Baker, on a tour of inspection of the A. E. F., whose visit was to have such terrific fruition, repudiated the war counsels which would have kept him out of the trenches on this gusty March day, and went down to see for himself and all the Americans at home how the doughboy was faring, and what could be done for him.

And as he peered over the parapet into No Man's Land, Secretary Baker said: "I am standing on the frontier of freedom." The phrase grew its wings in the saying, and by nightfall it had found the farthest doughboy.

The Paris newspapers announced, on the morning of March 12, that Secretary Baker was in France. The troops had it by noon. And questions flew in swarms. It was discovered that he would review the brigade of veterans who had returned from service at the front on March 20, and that meanwhile he would investigate the lines of communication.

After a few days in Paris, during which Secretary Baker delivered all the persuasions he had brought from President Wilson on behalf of a unified command of the Allied armies, and had, it was rumored, turned the scale in favor of a generalissimo, the distinguished civilian went to the coast to see the port city which was the pride of the army and the marvel of France.

The secretary rode to the coast on a French train, but, once there, he was transferred to an American train, which had to make up in sentimental importance the large lack it had of elegance.

A flat car was rapidly rigged up with plank benches. This had the merit of affording plenty of view, and, after all, that was what the secretary had come for.

After rolling over the main arteries of the 200 miles of terminal trackage, Secretary Baker inspected the warehouses, assembling-plants, camps, etc., and walked three mortal miles of dock front which his countrymen had evolved from an oozing marsh. He paid his highest compliments to the engineers and the laborers, and amazed the officers by the acuteness of his questions. If his visit did nothing else, it convinced the men on the job that the man back home knew what the obstacles were.

Secretary Baker's next visit was to the biggest of the aviation-fields, where again his technical understanding, as it came out in his questions, astounded and cheered the men who were doing the building.