Port to listening post

Foreword

Most of us, relatives and friends of our courageous warriors "over there," would be greatly pleased if it were possible for us to take up our abode in France during the duration of the war and so be near to help comfort and cheer our men in their great trials and also to enjoy on the ground with them their many triumphs.

The Young Men's Christian Association is endeavoring to give to the men overseas, as well as at home, in some degree many of the best things of home, church, school, club, entertainment, and friendship, from which they have been separated and which are so vital to them. The policy of the War Work Council of the Young Men's Christian Association is to send from time to time representatives of its Executive Committee to France for brief visits to study the work of the Association and to act as liaison officers between the New York and Paris offices.

In February, 19 18, I was thus commissioned by the Executive Committee, and had the good fortune to secure the following gentlemen to cooperate with me in the work of the mission — Former Senator LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi, a member of the War Work Council; John C. Acheson, LL.D., President of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Pittsburgh, Pa. ;

vi FOREWORD

James W. Kinnear, Pittsburgh, Pa., President of the Washington Ordnance Company, Washington, D. C, and the author of this book. During the two months spent in France our commission was enabled to visit nearly all of the camps, from the ports of entry, through the great training areas in the center of the country, to the front line trenches, traveling nearly six thousand miles, and thus had unusual opportunities to view all the phases of the work at first hand and to meet thousands of the men in the service.

Dr. Kerr's delightful and winning personality brought him an immediate and constant response on the part of the individual soldier, whose intimate life he was therefore enabled to appreciate thoroughly. Combining with these qualities his rare insight and good judgment on matters of policy and procedure, Dr. Kerr has been able in this book to bring to the homes of America in a most graphic manner just those things that we would like to know concerning the welfare of the men of our glorious Army and Navy.

Ralph W. Harbison.

Pittsburgh, Pa., November i, 1918.

Contents

PAGE

Foreword v

I. The Coming of the Convoy i

Chapter I The Coming Of The Convoy

We were waiting the coming of the Convoy. It was expected to arrive some time during the night, and for its coming everything was ready — the docks, the stevedores, the tradesfolk of the port, the ships in the harbor, the officers of the Army and the Navy, and the men and women of the Y M C A. We, too, were restlessly ready, for the coming of the Convoy into port meant not only news and greetings from America, but also the defiance of Germany and victory for the Allied nations, and immediate opportunity for service.

The hours of waiting were spent in the fifth floor apartment where the "Y" chief and his assistant were making their home. The rooms were beautifully furnished and I was told that the father and son of the household had gone to war. The son had been killed and the mother and daughters were keeping the home together against the time of victory.

The guests of the evening were two distinguished officers, one of the Army and the other of the Navy. The Navy and its daring deeds held the center of interest and it was well and truly represented by our distinguished guest, whose name would be recognized were I at liberty to give it.

I

As a rule, men of the Army are the worst critics of the Army, and men of the Navy the severest judges of the Navy, but our hero of the sea was unstinted in his praise of the American Navy, and his comrade of the Army readily seconded all his optimistic overtures. We were told tales of men who go down to the sea in ships and we picked our steps without blundering in the questions we asked and the information we sought. It is no easy task to ask sensible questions concerning military and naval secrets. I overheard a genial colonel graciously answer an unduly inquisitive war correspondent by saying, "It is not permissible for me to talk about that" ! One can gather lots of news in France, but most of the news turns out to be rumor. There is a military proverb which passes as current coin in France to this effect : "He that knows doesn't talk, and he that talks doesn't know." The boys in the Army say, "A military secret consists of inaccurate information concerning something which nobody knows anything about and about which everybody talks."

We were told of the "mystery ships" which, having served their day, have passed into history. They were freighters of the sea, fitted with machine guns and manned by experts of the Navy, who were dressed like ordinary seamen. One of these "mystery ships" holds the record of having ended the career of five submarines. We were told how a submarine had come to the surface so close to a French cruiser that it was impossible for it to discharge its torpedo, lest the submarine itself should be destroyed. The gunners on the cruiser turned their guns point blank and blew the German pirate to atoms.

We were told interesting tales of how submarines had fought submarines, which I suppose the censor would not choose to sanction for publication, but our guests were firm in the conviction that by the end of 1918 the submarine menace would be mastered. "Up to the present the policy pursued has been mainly defensive," one said. "Soon, however, something will happen and the end of the German submarines will come." Of course we wanted to ask another question so that he would explain exactly what he meant, but the bars were up and the subject of conversation changed. Afterwards, when we heard about Zeebrugge and how the British Navy had closed the port at Ostend, we thought we understood what he meant.

Throughout the Navy there seems to be a quiet and justified confidence that the submarine will be out of business before the year 1918 has run its course. We hear little of the daring deeds of the men of the Navy, but they are among our first heroes. All of them are on board some mystery ship and by day and night they keep the channels of the sea safe for the traffic of the nations of freedom. Every morning the British mine sweepers make the English Channel safe. It was interesting to learn that English mines, when they drift from their moorings, turn over and are harmless. German floating mines remain intact and explode anywhere.

The men of the navies of all the allied nations wear no medals, no croix de guerre, no distinguishing recognition for service rendered, no badge to allure the ever vigilant spy. They sail they know not where, from unnamed port to unnamed port, and are out upon the sea from dawn to dark, from dark to dawn. These men are among the finest heroes the world has ever seen, and every man of them is worthy of the honor given to men in front line trenches.

The sailor at your side is sure to be a hero and his story will thrill you if you get him to tell it. Traveling through France I met a young Lieutenant of the French Navy, who did not seem to have passed his twentieth year. Educated in an English school, he had acted for two years as an interpreter with the English fleet. His father is a member of the French Parliament. He had been a year with the French fleet out on the Mediterranean, and had just been home on a fifteen-day holiday and was returning to another year's work. He had no knowledge of the military or naval situation, but he had absolute trust in his leaders and perfect confidence in the outcome. He had been torpedoed seventeen times, five times he had been in the water, and once he had seen seven of his comrades swept from the bridge in a storm. He would have been the last to think of himself as a hero, and he is typical of thousands who today defy Germany's danger zone.

In the morning the Convoy was in. Thirty thousand men had arrived, every man of them disappointed because the enemy had not been encountered, but all of them glad to see the land of the tricolor. There is little shouting and cheering in this war and the ships had slipped into port unheralded. Only as the greymist of the morning lifted did the newly arrived giants of the harbor reveal themselves. The Convoy had done its work and the ships had come safely in from sea. How strange they looked, each one splashed with color after a manner that defied all attempts at explanation ! The science of camouflage follows its own order. Sometimes it is a mysterious and mottled order; sometimes it is plain and prosaic; sometimes it follows broad distinguished lines ; sometimes it is fantastic and poetic; and again it is of an order that is murderously monotonous.

If today we fear the submarine less than we did, let us thank the Convoy. If the hands of the Germans are tied let us not forget that the Hun still prides himself in his pagan policy, and let us remember that the Allied Navy holds the supremacy of the sea. Since the war broke out the British Navy has transported 13,000,000 men, of whom only 2,700 have been lost. Besides these millions of men the British Navy has carried to the battle front 2,000,000 horses and mules, 500,000 motor cars, 25,000,000 tons of explosives and supplies, 51,000,000 tons of oil and fuel, and 130,000,- 000 tons of food, and has swept the warships of Germany from the sea. When it is within her power Germany still sends sailors and passengers adrift in open boats, and what that means only the thousands who have experienced it can know. I have heard soldiers and sailors in France try to describe the terror of those open boats. One American boy who had been brought into port, rescued by a British patrol boat, said, in telling his experience, "I was in the sea for five hours. After I was picked up and brought to land, for three nights, in my dreams, I was in the water."

Mr. Alfred Noyes has described what sometimes takes place when men and women and little children fall into the hands of the modern disciples of Kultur.

"The two boats," he says, "kept together till dark; but at 8 140 p. m. the chief officer's boat capsized, owing to the choppy sea, and the sight of the other boat was lost in the confusion. All hands, after a struggle, managed to regain the boat, but she remained full of water, with her tanks adrift.

"Before midnight she had again capsized three times; and the reader may imagine for himself what scenes were enacted in that lonely darkness of wind and sea. Only four hands out of fifteen were left at the end of the third desperate struggle. They were the mate, the carpenter, and two seamen.

"They saw one or two vessels in the early morning, but their only means of signaling was a handkerchief on a stick, and they were not noticed. The boat was battered to and fro like a cockle-shell in the smoking seas; and about eight o'clock in the morning the two seamen became too exhausted to cling on. They were slowly washed overboard. Their faces and hands swirled up once or twice in the foam, and then disappeared.

"At five o'clock on that day, after long hours of struggle, the mate, who was sitting aft, gradually dropped into the water in the bottom of the boat and died there. The carpenter was now the only survivor. All that he endured in the long following night and day, with the dead man washing to and fro at his feet, and the dead face looking up at him through the bubbling water, can only be imagined. He says that 'nothing particular happened.'

"At nightfall on the next day, more than twenty-four hours later, after twenty-four hours of lonely battering and slow starvation, he and the dead body were picked up by a Grimsby trawler and landed at St. Ives. Nothing was heard of the other boat."

Thanks to the Convoy, such stories of the sea are becoming less and less familiar. Victory, however, will not cause us to forget the price Germany must pay for peace. It must be nothing less than the price of penitence.

There is something about a Convoy that suggests security. It has the flavor of friendliness. My friend, Major Thomas S. Arbuthnot of Base Hospital 2J, told me of the marvelous trip he and his comrades had experienced crossing the Atlantic, and how by a signal gun from one of the destroyers they had been saved from a submarine attack. He said, "Just to think of those little destroyers plunging through the sea, tearing through the darkness, undismayed and undaunted, never resting, never tired, and then when we had entered the harbor and felt the sense of security stealing over us, to see them turn and without a salute go back to sea to take up their vigil for other seafaring soldiers. I wanted at least to say, 'Thank you/ but they were gone." Hats off to the Convoy! Thomas Huxley, after he had seen the shipping of New York harbor, exclaimed, "If I were not a man, I would like to be a tug!" Had he lived in our day and known the new dangers and the new service of the sea, he would say, "If I were not a man, and a soldier, I would like to be a submarine destroyer and convoy the soldiers of freedom to the shores of France."

Among the first to welcome the Convoy is the Y M C A. To see one's own language in a foreign land is like meeting a friend, and as the morning broke the troops on both sides of the ship were face to face with the sign of the Red Triangle and its welcome :

American Soldiers and Sailors in Franc^«ELC0MES YOU

At this Basfe you/will find

1. The Officers' Club. V 3*/ln every Camp one or

2. The City Hut (To the cofe?/ more Huts with no key in ner and one block north)y the Door.

On each troopship a "Y" Secretary had kept company with the men across the water. He had entered into close and friendly relations with them and by the time the Convoy was in port he had bound them to him in enduring friendship.

On board ship men have time to think and time to get acquainted. The Secretary discovers talent. On the ship which took us over we were in great need of a pianist and accidentally discovered him among a group of marines going over for hydroplane service.

He happened to be a Roman Catholic and was hesitant about playing at the Sunday morning service. He found out, however, that distinctions of civil life do not carry over into the Army. He knew how to play the piano and was eager to serve, and so together we made of the Sunday service a great success. Next day I found him depressed, his eyes filled with tears, and heard from him the story of his life. He had left at home a little motherless girl of four.

Sometimes a man among the troops finds the sea and the submarine and the danger zone all but too much for his courage. After three days down below where he had seen the doctor twice a day, a colored lad came on deck, rather weak and pale. The wind was blowing, southwest by west, and the boat was not, as you say, quite steady. One of our Y M C A men found him and said: "How are you going, George?" "Pretty poorly, Sir, I feel pretty low." Said his comforter, "Well, we'll soon be over now." "Yes," said George, "but the worse is yet to come. Them submarines live right in here, don't they ?" The "Y" man told him about the speed of the ship and those dogs of war, the guns pointing out to sea, and after a few minutes of thought George said: "If I hadn't come on this trip, I'd been married next month." His friend said, "She'll wait for you, all right, and she'll think all the more of you for doing what you are going to do for her and your country."

After a long pause during which the ship tipped and rolled, George said : "I've been thinking a lot during these last few days and I have come to the conio PORT TO LISTENING POST

elusion that if I ever get through this voyage and do my bit, I'll never get into a place of excitement again." And having said this, he went below.

Every soldier has his own Convoy story. I was particularly interested in Joe Rogers' story. Joe is at present acting as chauffeur at one of the great rest camps. Accidentally we had him as our guest for luncheon at the Hotel de France, in a little town that nestles close to the beautiful French Alps. Unaware that he was interesting he told us of his trip across the sea in one of the great converted German liners that now run between America and France. "I was six decks down," he said, "and it was like being in hell. There were six thousand of us on board that ship, and they would not let us sleep on deck. The port-holes were closed as tight as a bank vault, and you could see the darkness and cut the air with a knife." "I was six decks down," he repeated, "and every morning when the gong sounded I woke up unconscious and had to walk an hour on deck before I came to my senses. We ran out of one storm into another and I thought the end of the world had come. No ! I was not sick, but you should have seen the bunch ! It was like a street market on Saturday night. For three days the old boat played leap-frog with the waves, and sometimes when it didn't quite make the leap it would lie on the top of the wave and quiver until I wondered whether it would turn over again on its back, or topple over on its stomach, but of course it always came back. Four of the gunners were swept from the deck, and when we last saw them they were

THE COMING OF THE CONVOY n

on the crest of a wave, their hands up as if signaling a farewell. Ships at sea in war time do not stop at the call, 'Man overboard/ We had to sit on the floor when mess was served, and it sure was a mess ! To keep from sliding I wrapped my legs around one of the pillars and had my hands free. They gave us Cream of Wheat for breakfast, but the floor and walls and sometimes the roof got most of the Cream of Wheat, and then when the ship lurched we all slid like an avalanche from one side to the other with a bang. I want to cross the darned old ocean once more, and that is when I go home."

Among the first to come on board the troop ships are the "Y" men. They take with them a few cigarettes, a little chocolate, and always a welcome. They answer questions and give directions about money, about France, about the life on shore, and hand the men a little printed slip with information to help them through their first days in France. They give advice concerning leisure time and directions about places and points of interest.

At one port of entry the men were given this printed welcome :

MEN, you are coming among a people, who have seen fought upon their soil many of the greatest battles in the history of the world, a people, whose sons have in this war gladly given their lives and who have been backed by unparalleled sacrifices on the part of their loved ones at home. It is they, with their splendid fighting brothers of the British Empire, who have stood, for nearly four years, between Germany and your own home land.

Remember always that you are in France as the GUESTS of a noble people and have come, not to win the war for the Allies, but to help them to win it. In the minds of the French people you represent the UNITED STATES, and wherever you go, we trust that by your exemplary conduct, your chivalry, and your respect for these people and their customs, you will endear yourselves to them and thereby cement the two Republics in an everlasting bond of mutual sympathy and respect. Remember too, that in France you are among a people who are universally polite and who set great store by the smaller courtesies of life. For the slightest service you will always receive thanks ("Merci, Monsieur") and will always be expected to give them.

God bless and keep each one of you.

The American Y M C A.

A thousand men had come ashore at one of the French ports where they mingled with the English Tommies, and I was permitted in one of the British huts to give them a welcome. The men had been at sea for nearly twenty days, and for twenty-four hours had been in the English Channel. They said they were lost in the mine fields. For nearly a month they had been out of touch with the world. They were hungry for news. I told them of the German drive on Paris, of Pershing's message to General Foch offering him the American Army, of British valor and French heroism, and of the hope which America through the coming of her soldiers had brought to the Allies.

The British soldiers with their seamed faces and weather-beaten countenances gave a touch of prophecy to the situation. Our lads — what was between them and the seamed face and the weather-beaten countenance, and the dread monotony of war? The welcome was short, and then in a moment of heroism I told the new arrivals I would try to answer any of their questions. Immediately the machine gun batteries were opened :

"How far are we from the front ?"

"How about the chow over here?"

"Do the soldiers get their pay regularly?"

"What will you give us for the head of the Kaiser?"

"Will there be a ' Y' wherever we go ?"

"How often do we get our mail ?"

"How many American soldiers are there in France ?"

These are a few of the questions they asked. I tried to answer them. I told them that the mail was very uncertain, but that the number of letters they received depended on the frequency with which those at home wrote, and advised them to have their letters numbered, for they might get their fifteenth letter first. I offered them a commission and a life pension for the head of the Kaiser, and told them that I did not know how many American soldiers were in France, but hoped there would soon be enough to smash Germany.

Two men each volunteered a suggestion. The first remark was to the effect that if the Army did its work as well as the "Y," the war would soon be over, which statement was received with a round of applause. The second remark was facetious and interpretative of the coming of the Convoy. "If ever I get home and that Old Lady they call the Statue of Liberty wants to see me again she'll have to turn round."

Chapter II The Sound Of The Guns

The heart of America is in France. A million and more of our boys are there and more are to follow. I have seen thousands of them and some whom I wished to see I failed to discover. But France is at war, and our Army is at war and is ever on the move. All we know is that they are "Somewhere in France." Said one lad when asked if he knew where a certain soldier was, "I know where I am; I don't know where anyone else is, and nobody knows where I am." Sometimes the censor relents and lets information regarding the whereabouts of a soldier go through to his family. Recently this statement was received: "I am sorry I cannot tell you where I am ; but I venture to state that I am not where I was, but where I was before I left to go where I have just come from."

One knows as soon as he is in France that he is in a war atmosphere. Even before he lands he is face to face with mystery and the menace of war. There are Mystery Ships upon the sea, and the land is full of mystery. A little grove of pine trees may be a battery, and the hillside a fort. The hillside may look quite natural, when suddenly a gun speaks and you know that you are near the battle line. Everywhere there are signs warning you of danger. In the railroad trains and in the stations one reads the words "Taisez Vous, Mefier Vous, Les Oreilles Ennemies Vous Ecoutent." Since the days when Governor Gallieni stood guard at Paris, when the Germans were driving along the Marne, that sign has been before the eyes of the French people, "Don't Talk, Beware, The Enemy is Listening."

Even Paris is like an armed camp. The poet somewhere speaks of Paris as a woman's town with flowers in her hair. But the Paris we remember is gone, and there is a new Paris — a Paris with hangars and airships, with cellar gratings sealed for an expected gas attack, with window panes reenforced with strips of paper, with no private automobiles, with hotel life stripped of fashion and luxury, with the Arc de Triomphe, the windows of the Louvre, and the statues in the Place de la Concorde buttressed and safeguarded with sandbags. It is Paris with dark nights and unlighted streets welcoming fog and rain and mist. It is Paris with signs upon the houses calling attention to caves, to improvised dbris, where ten, fifteen, twenty, or one hundred people may find security when a raid is on. It is Paris with flickering blue street-lamps marking the crossings and the metropolitan stations. It is Paris alert and watchful, but self-reliant and secure. Candy shops and cigar stores are gone. Here and there the shutters on the windows bear the sign that the man power that carried on the business is at the front. The soldiers of all the Allied nations meet and pass often without salute, and fifty miles away the enemy is pounding at the door.

i6 PORT TO LISTENING POST

Nevertheless, with all the bombing and shelling, it is Paris. It is still Paris unshaken and unharmed. You have to search for the damage done after you thought the city had been shaken to its very foundation.

I was in Paris when the Germans expected to break through. The Kaiser is reported to have said : "They are not united, I will beat them." God knows how nearly he succeeded, and he timed his blows and concentrated all he had upon that drive. It was then that the mystery of the long-range gun and the bombing in the nights disturbed the confidence of the French Capital, and for ten days Paris seemed to move out and those that remained spent restless days and sleepless nights. Yet Paris is unharmed and unafraid. She has learned to hear the shriek of the siren and to sleep on. For a while she listened to the beating of the drum telling that the long-range gun was in action, and then she laughed the drummer from the streets. A shell fell upon a worshiping congregation and seventy people were killed. That was a German victory! A bomb fell upon a maternity hospital and the list of dead included a nurse, two mothers, and a little child just born. That is the way Germany is conquering Paris. Next day a French newspaper published these defiant lines entitled "Victory."

"Across the plains of Picardy Proud Amiens flings her taunt at thee, Bidding thee tame her if thy will Transcends the faith that lights her still.

A line of freemen bars the way Where all thy legions lunge and sway And wither into shadow. Where Is any show of triumph there?

"But dare man say that all thy pain Is bootless, all thine effort vain ? That all thy trafficking in life Through four black years of frustrate strife Has gained thee nothing but a curse? The list of dead includes a nurse, Two mothers, and a new-born child.

"The murder of the undefiled, The random slaughter of the weak — What greater triumphs wouldst thou seek ?"

We saw those wonderful French armies moving up to battle. They came from the South and from the West, but mostly from the East — from East of Rheims and beyond Verdun, leaving our men to man the lines. They came by trains that passed us every seven minutes, loaded in cattle cars, forty men to the car. Every seven minutes a military train passed with men and war materials and mounted machine guns ready for action, and every half-hour a hospital train equipped with operating cars and doctors and nurses went by, to return in a few days with its load of shattered and wounded humanity. They came in trucks, long lines of automobiles moving quickly over those wonderful French roads, with guns and ammunition, with food and men. They came in troops of cavalry over the dusty roads, messing by the side of the railroad, and climbing down over the bank to secure the French newspaper which we threw from the train telling them of the tidings of battle. There seemed to be no end to the line of march, no limit to the men France had to pour in to stem that German advance. One wonders whether more to admire the soldiers or the mothers and fathers and sweethearts who bade them goodbye. Those soldiers, who had seen two, three, and four years of war, waved their goodbyes to the French peasants who threw them a flower or a kiss and listened to the ringing confidence with which they called back "Comptez sur nous," and count on them they did. Soon we heard that the German armies had come to a standstill.