A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

But right in the middle of that exciting procession of trains came something that brought my heart to my throat. It was an immensely long train of all new cars, painted olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters on the side. And the cars, dozens and dozens of them, were loaded with railroad building material. Portable tracks, switches, signals, exactly like the expensive and fascinating toy railroads which children delight in. Steel rails, wooden ties, machinery for laying them, flat cars, wheels, tools and nails, and last of all tiny little locomotives, two of them to a flat car, all American, going up to the front with the French and the English soldiers.

Right behind that train of cars came another, a shorter one, and this was full of brown-clad American engineers, going up to the front with the allied soldiers, to lay those tracks and operate that little narrow-gauge railroad under gun-fire. Our own sons.

That was not all. In the middle of the afternoon another train went northward, olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters. This was a hospital train of entirely new cars, the finest and most complete I had ever seen. It was a palace on wheels, with every conceivable appliance for the comfort of wounded soldiers. There were kitchen cars, operating cars, X-ray compartments, cars with beds, cars with couches for the sitting cases. Cars for doctors and nurses as well as patients. Nothing I had seen, not even men going into the trenches, brought home to me so sharply the fact that we were in the war and were fully determined to hold our end up.

We could not have done it so well had we not, in the last fifty years, developed such extraordinary railroad builders and operators. The French had a railroad system adequate for peace-time uses, but when war came, and especially after the tide of Americans began to pour into the country, the system had to be enormously enlarged. It had to be planned and organized also, in order not to disturb unduly the life of the country. And it had to be done quickly.

It is not going beyond the permissible line to say that our railroad experts have worked out a wonderful system for the transportation of men and supplies. Several big seaports in the northwest now receive most of the men who in larger and larger units are being transported to France. One very large port in the southwest is the receiving station of most of the supplies sent over. A network of railroads, some of which we have double-tracked, convey these men and the supplies eastward and northward to their destinations. There is never any confusion of freight and passenger trains, because they do not start from the same ports, and most of the time they are not even on the same lines.

All through central France along this railroad system the Americans have taken over old towns and cities as bases for war work. Outside of the towns are great camps, with army bakeries, quartermasters’ depots, hospitals, shops and factories. In one of these camps, near a railroad junction, is a supply station which is preparing to feed a million men at the front. At another camp I saw a distribution depot for medical and surgical supplies for the whole army. At both of these camps railroad building was going on at a lively rate, miles and miles of spurs and switches.

At a lovely old town which was once the stronghold of feudal barons, whose hoary old château rises over the place like a watch tower, I saw an immense factory for repairing locomotives and rolling stock. It was no flimsy wooden structure built for a few months, but an enormous mass of brick and concrete such as we build in Pittsburgh and Gary. I saw in the woods outside this town gangs of American foresters. I saw American sawmills. I saw logging trains manned by Americans.

I have seen American workmen making wagons, portable houses, trucks, locomotives. I have seen them building cold storage warehouses and ice-making plants. Building them substantially, as though we had moved to Europe to stay, as indeed we have until we put the war out of the world, together with the militarism that made it.

Do the Germans know it? Their leaders do, of course, but I doubt very much whether the mass of the people do. Working under guard in many of our camps in France are gangs of German prisoners. Watching several hundred of these men, in fierce green uniforms and shapeless boots, I asked the young officer who was my escort what they thought of the American activities.

“I was curious about that, too,” he replied, “and I took pains to find out. Would you believe it, that most of the prisoners refuse to credit the fact that we are here at all? They say, ‘Before we were taken prisoner our officers told us that we would see soldiers who would claim to be Americans, but they aren’t. They are Canadians or English. The Americans can not get over here. Our kaiser has said so.’”