A Visit to the Washington Front

An Intrepid War-Correspondent Visits the Capital's Trenches and Trenchermen

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY

LABORING under the delusion that the important manoeuvers of this war are taking place in France, many newspapers and magazines have dispatched correspondents overseas to send back stories on "Paris in War Time," or "War Time Paris," or perhaps even "Paris and the War."

Now and again some intrepid journalist, who has been taken on Sight-seeing Tour No. 4-b, conducted for visiting writers by the French government, will give an account of trench-life, throwing in touches of local color in the form of such typical trench phrases as "allons" and "tiens"

Those who have seen particularly deeply into the workings of things at the front will even mention a "poste de secours."

But no magazine except Vanity Fair has ever had the discernment to note that the real soldier war is right here in the unquestionably United States and that the actual front-line trenches are located in Washington. Anyone who doubts this, has only to stand by the Treasury Building at lunch hour and count the uniforms as they go by. In comparison with this martial array, Pershing's camp would look like a citizen's mass-meeting.

IT was for the purpose of investigating the conditions of this most kuppenheimer of cantonments that Vanity Fair sent me to Washington. I was to mingle with the officers at the front-line desks, see how they live and what they think, note the reactions on the American soldier temperament when subjected to the constant whirr of typewriters and clanging of elevator doors; in short, to write an epic of the American warrior who has pledged himself to fight it out on the District line if it takes all summer.

I had been forced to stay in Baltimore for two or three days before I could arrange with the authorities for my passports to the Washington front, for now that the war is really on, it is felt best to have as few civilians as possible on the streets of the National Capital, lest the sight of them have a softening effect on the morale of the members of the Army and Navy reserves stationed there. These captains and ensigns who are on stenographic duty simply have to be fed on raw meat to keep their fighting blood up, and the sight of too many tweed suits and four-in-hand ties about town might tend to take their minds off the grim business they have in hand.

AT last, however, I broke through the redtape entanglements. It just occurs to me that there might be a good story in the redtape at Washington. No one seems to have thought about it yet. . . . (Veiled sar-

casm, that was.) I was permitted to pass through the lines, however, with the stipulation that I wear a uniform of some sort, a condition which the elevator-boy in our apartment helped me to carry out. My regalia, although it had "Armageddon Courts" done in gold letters on the collar, was fairly natty and caused many passers-by to pull out their Brooks Bros, edition of "How to Tell the Officers from the Privates" and thumb around in a search for the key to my insignia.

"To what sector of the front do we go first?" I asked of the young captain who had been detailed to show me about. He was a charming young warrior, whose regular war work was making blue-prints for laundry constructions in the Prophylactic Corps, but, as this was a cloudy day he couldn't make any prints and so had been withdrawn from the actual firingline to perform the safer but less thrilling duties of docent. I could see, however, that his captain's blood was fairly seething to get back and lead his men along the tin roof to the blue-print frames, come what might.

"I think, sir," he replied with a soldierly air, bom of six weeks in the army, "that it will be advisable for us to begin with the encampment of the mounted architects. They combine the picturesque side of war, which one always associates with horsemen, with the practical grimness of regular army life. I am sure that you will get a thrill from the mounted architects."

He said this with a touch of pride, and I afterward found out that he had, but the day before, saved a blue-print of the rear elevation of a dry-cleansing hut from over-exposure, and was pretty fairly sure of his majority in this coveted organization of horsemen.

CAREFULLY we threaded our way among the throngs of first lieutenants who were sitting in rows on benches or standing in groups in front of the War Department. They were matching pennies, polishing their puttees or practising saluting each other, and were apparently awaiting, with characteristic coolness, the word for mobilization.

"And these young dragoons," I asked, not without a touch of sadness in my voice, "what grim duty are they soon to perform?"

"These are the despatch riders," my guide explained. "They ride in automobiles and are entrusted with letters and papers to carry from one office to another. Sometimes, if they have previously proved their mettle, they are told to wait for an answer. They are liable to be called on at any hour of the day, from nine-fifteen or nine-twenty-five in the morning to five at carry a note, perhaps even to the War College or some equally distant point, rain or shine, shine or rain, and yet I have never heard one of them complain or seen the youngest of the first lieutenants among them flinch in the face of his duty."

And, even as he spoke, a bell sounded at a desk inside, and a gruff, military voice shouted "a messenger." The officer nearest to the door was on his feet in three or four minutes and reported for orders, which, as it so happened, were to run over to the nearest grocery and get a box of graham crackers for the Brigadier-General's lunch. If the people back home could have seen the do-or-die expression on that District Messenger Corps Lieutenant's face as he started out on his assignment, they would realize that we are in this war to the bitter end.

E were approaching the office building in which were quartered the mounted architects. It was an inspiring sight as we entered the drafting-room. Row upon row of captains and majors bending over drawing-boards, with their military insignia on their shoulder-straps glittering in the electric light as they swung their pens back and forth across the paper, and, where they twined their riding-boots around the rungs of their stools, there was presented to the eye of the observer an array of silver spurs which gave the lie to the rumor that the cavalry has passed its glory as a branch of the service.

I approached one of these defenders of the Faith, a young major of twenty-two, and, taking out my correspondent's note-book, asked him for a brief, human-nature interview that I could send home to the Sunday paper, in dialect if possible, stating his feelings when charging on horse-back.

"I'm very sorry," he said, "but you see I was brought up rather tenderly, and I have never been nearer to a horse than a horse'sneck. These spurs just happened to go with the uniform."

Just then the bugle sounded that stirring call, "Luncheon at the New Willard," and the whole roomful of mounted Captains and Majors was in a turmoil. In one little group alone, I saw two of the officers fall, in their gallant efforts to go over the top on their frenzied way to the entrees and the plats du jour.

FROM here we picked our way over to the sector held by the Filing Squad, and what I saw there can be told only to soft music. Here were captains and first lieutenants, each one of them every inch a bond-salesman, standing all day within sound of the sizzling steam of the office radiators, calmly filing correspondence just as unconcernedly as if they were safe at home, which they were. It was a sight calculated to make one stop and think. In fact, many of them actually did so.

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One young major in particular, a rosycheeked boy of twenty-two, was in the midst of a problem of military tactics which was causing him a great deal of trouble, although, soldier-like, he tried to hide his distress.

Drawing out my note-book I made a pencil sketch of him just as he was, all flushed from his recent exertion, the picture of a hardy Crusader for Democracy on whom the German General Staff would do well to reckon.

"Do you find that this rough life at the front is at all brutalizing?" I asked him.

"Well," he replied with characteristic Yankee directness, "that depends. Before I became a major in the Filing Squad I was just beginning work in a bond house. At first I wanted to go into the Aviation Corps, but then it occurred to me that my training fitted me more for this sort of work, in which I could perhaps be of more value than in actual service at the front. Every one must do his bit, you know."

IT is this spirit of self-sacrifice that I found all over the Washington front. On my very first day in Washington I met a man who, all his life had hated animals, hated to touch them, hated have them about the house, and yet to had accepted a commission as colonel in the Zoological Corps and was in charge of the breeding and training of guineapigs for experimental purposes, yet no one, except his relatives and speaking acquaintances, ever heard him complain. It was the Spirit of '76 reincarnated, that's what it was.

AND, as a final adventure, I was taken to the new Willard Hotel to see the officers making the best of their army food. Here were men who had been used to the best of everything that money could buy, coming to the officers' mess in the Gold Room of the Willard with a cheery smile and a friendly nod to the head waiter, living exponents of the claim that war is the great democratize: As I stood there, amid the clinking of forks and the swish of starched napery and heard the head-waiter hissing to the buss-boys, it was as if I were transported back to the Ritz in New York, where most of these boys in uniform had had their fling in the days before the war. It brought a mist to my eyes to see them now, apparently doing the same thing as they did at the Ritz, and yet, in reality, how different!

That is the question. . . . How different?