Major Dawes put up at the Ritz and hurried around to Pershing’s office. The general said at once he wanted him as General Purchasing Agent. “It’s a man’s work,” wrote Dawes in his diary, “but I am thankful beyond words that it is work that will count for my country in its hour of greatest trial.”
To make sure that the record he decided to keep of his trials and achievements with the A.E.F. should not fall into the wrong hands, he trotted across the Place Vendôme to the Morgan Harjes bank and rented a safedeposit box. Whenever he had a spare moment he sat in one of the little rooms they furnished their customers to cut coupons in, to jot down the events of the day.
“… Dear fellow and loyal friend,” he wrote of the general in an access of gratitude. “I hope I do not fail him. We have both passed through the greatest grief which can come to man …” He was thinking of the loss of his son Rufus drowned some months before Pershing lost his wife and daughters. These tragedies were a bond between them. His first day in Paris when Pershing and Dawes were being driven to the general’s quarters for lunch “there occurred an instance of telepathy which was too much for either of us. Neither of us was saying anything but I was thinking of my lost boy and of John’s loss and looking out the window, and he was doing the same thing on the other side of the automobile. We both turned at the same time and each was in tears. All John said was ‘Even this war can’t keep it out of my mind.’ ”
Dawes was accustomed to the millionaire’s life, but he liked to recall the days when he and John Pershing used to eat fifteen cent lunches together at the lunchcounter of a certain Don Cameron. He was flabbergasted by the Hôtel de Lannes. “As I looked around me I said ‘John, when I contrast these barren surroundings with the luxuriousness of our early life in Lincoln, Nebraska, it does seem that a good man has no chance in the world.’ To which John meditatively replied, ‘Don’t it beat hell?’ ”
The first problems Pershing put up to his purchasing agent were lumber and coal. He needed lumber immediately to build cantonments at Chaumont, where his staff was already outgrowing the barracks building they started with. American units were bidding against each other for scarce French supplies. The French were stuffy about cutting their national forests.
Coal was needed to heat the cantonments and offices and for the railroads that were to supply the A.E.F. There was plenty of coal in England, but the British were stuffy about parting with colliers to bring it across the Channel for their American allies. Dawes set his operatives to scouting the Great Lakes for freighters, he requisitioned tramp steamers.
He suggested to the French that American miners might teach them to increase production in their own mines but was told that was impossible; the trade unions would never allow it. The officials shrugged: “Les syndicate …”
Dawes began to learn that there were subtle shadings to war in Europe. Politicians had connections that crossed the frontiers. Certain places were never bombed. Certain ships were never sunk. In the business world certain tolerances and understandings had grown up between enemy states despite the daily massacre on the front lines.
Warweariness was the prevailing mood. Even the German Reichstag had passed a resolution urging a peace of understanding and the permanent reconciliation of the peoples. The call for a peace without annexations or indemnities, continually broadcast over the wireless by the firebrands of the Petrograd Soviet, re-echoed Woodrow Wilson’s old slogan: peace without victory. Socialist visionaries meeting in Stockholm hammered on the theme. The people of Europe were pricking up their ears. In France it wasn’t only the army that was mutinous. Alarmists kept whispering that unless sufficient coal could be found for heating in the coming winter the civilian population would rise in revolution.
“Everybody, Germany included, except America, seems ‘fed up’ as the British say,” Dawes put down somewhat dolefully in the privacy of his diary. The men on Pershing’s staff seemed to fear their war might be taken away from them before they could show what they could do.
Dawes worked like a beaver. He had set up his office in Paris in early September. By the first week in October he could tell the general with some confidence that coal was on the way. He had agents established in Switzerland and Spain for purchasing a long list of scarce items obtainable in those countries. Sitting in the quiet of Morgan Harjes’ one Saturday he found the leisure to note a few general deductions from his experience so far: “When the source of main military supply is so far distant from the point of use, as is the case with the United States and its army in France, the importance of coördination increases in proportion to its difficulty.”
The principle that Pershing and his staff were trying to inculcate in the War Department was that the flow of supplies should be managed and controlled from the point of use, which meant the headquarters of the A.E.F. “Priority in shipments, route of shipment (ports of disembarkation), and relative necessity of material should be, barring exceptional emergency, determined here and not in America,” wrote Dawes. “If we fail … in this war it will be because we do not coordinate quickly enough. Pershing and all of us see this. We are working for it night and day.”
Two days later Dawes was able to note that the first of his coal was actually being loaded on a requisitioned ship at an English port.
“The war has resolved itself in a large degree into a freight tonnage situation for the present.” His optimism overflowed. While “the mighty work of American preparation,” in which he was so happy to have a part, went on, “Great Britain is making a splendid offensive.”
Haig’s great offensive, glowingly described as a series of victories in the dispatches of gullible war correspondents schooled by the same General Charteris who invented the story about the German corpse factory — Charteris was Haig’s Intelligence officer — was forcing the Germans to concentrate divisions in Flanders, but at the cost of enormous expenditure of munitions and men.
The operation started just a week after Pershing visited the Fifth Army, and was shown the relief map of the terrain to be captured, and lunched to the sound of bagpipes with jolly General Gough. It had been planned for early in the summer, but Lloyd George’s opposition, the hesitations of the French and the complications of supply, caused it to be put off from week to week. It was a race with the treacherous Flemish weather. Zero hour came the day the short dry season ended.
Haig’s delays gave the German general staff time to organize a defense in depth and to prepare troops fresh from the walkaway on the Russian front for the sharp counterattacks on which they relied so heavily. “I had a certain feeling of satisfaction when this new battle began,” von Hindenburg reminisced in his memoirs. “… It was with a feeling of absolute longing that we waited for the wet season … great stretches of the Flanders flat would then become impassable.”
The wet season began the very day of the attack. In spite of the threatening sky Haig ordered his Fifth Army to go over the top anyway. The weeks of bombardment had so pitted the swampy ground in front of Ypres it would have been difficult to negotiate in dry weather. In rain it proved impassable. The tanks bogged down. The German pillboxes proved impregnable. The slight gains made to the north of the city merely brought the British troops into a dangerous salient where they were enfiladed by artillery fire from the higher ground between Passchendaele and Gheluvelt. By noon of the first day it was obvious to everyone except Haig and his staff that the offensive was a failure.