where on June 26, 1917, he was joined by units of the first division, regular army troops, who had arrived Pershing at Brest. On July 4 he marched the troops in France that Joffre had called for through the streets of Paris. The headquarters of the A.E.F. were maintained at Paris for a few weeks while Pershing studied the military situation on the western front and made his plans for American France the organization, training, and operation of his base in forces. At the end of August he moved his headquarters halfway across France to the ancient town of Chaumont where he was within easy striking distance of his sector on the western front, and the training areas provided for the American divisions. The western front of 1917 was battered but unbroken after three years of war. Each side had repeatedly shown that it was possible to bend the line, but neither had possessed the continued power to break through. The unwillingness of the United States to permit its troops to be used for replacements in the British and French armies, as the Allies would have preferred, made it necessary to assign a sector to the forces under Pershing. England was already in possession of the northern end of the line with her supplies in the rear connected by her network of military railroads with the French and Belgian Channel ports. It could not be suggested that she entrust the defense of the Channel to another force or abandon the short lines of communication between her armies and London. For France the vital strategic factor was the defense of Paris, and from that city the net of railroads to her front was such that no foreign military force could be thrust in and be of service. The American forces had not even been assembled when Pershing took up the question of their disposition with the English and the French. He received as his assignment the quiet sector between the great fortresses of Belfort and Verdun. Here the American armies could do the least damage if ineffective, and here they could be supplied without bringing disorder to the British and French lines of communication north of Paris. The same reasons that assigned Pershing to the region of Chaumont required him to utilize as seaport bases the French shore south of Brest. There was equal determination that the American forces should remain a unit and that they should not constitute a burden upon France. The collier Jupiter, laden with ten thousand tons of wheat, preceded the arrival of the first contingents in France, and engineer regiments, railroad regiments, and forestry regiments followed to take possession of the seaport towns. They dredged the harbors, and opened channels up the tidal rivers. They built docks and constructed railway sidings where their gantry cranes could lift their cargoes from the steamship hold to the waiting freight-car. They constructed assembling plants where the freight-cars and the locomotives as they came from the United States were put together. They rebuilt the light French railroads to carry heavy American rolling stock from Brest to Le Mans, from Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, and Bordeaux to Tours, and thence across France south of Paris to the Chaumont region, where the main lines were sprayed out in branches toward the battle front. At Tours Pershing erected a secondary headquarters for the Services of Supply. All along the lines of communication from the seaboard bases through the intermediate regions to the zone of advance, cantonments were erected and schools prepared to house and train the troops as they should come, while the departments in Washington were instructed to forward the materials of war upon tables of automatic supply. Each increment of twenty-five thousand troops was to bring with it an initial equipment and every month thereafter for each similar number of troops overseas supplies were to be forwarded in accordance with the tables. The correspondent of the London Times who inspected the American plant in France in February, 1918, declared that there was "no question that the General Staff of the army is delivering supplies and material upon the longest lines of communication in the annals of war." The preparations for an independent army, powerful |