y
Quartermaster to reveal all these facts. The electric lights had been
unused for fifteen months when he arrived there, and he started to see
what he could do to put the plant back to work. It required nothing
less finally than a special action by the French Minister of War whereby
orders were received by Monsieur X commanding him to leave his regiment
at the front and go back to his plant by the riverside and start making
electricity again.

With the lights on and water piped in for bathing facilities, and
extensive arrangements made for the instalment of stoves and other
heating apparatus, the purchase of wood fuel and fodder for the animals,
the Brigade moved in and occupied the camp.

The American officer in command of that post went there as a Brigadier
General. As I observed him at his work in those early days, I seemed to
see in his appearance and disposition some of the characteristics of a
Grant. He wore a stubby-pointed beard and he clamped his teeth tight on
the butt end of a cigar. I saw him frequently wearing the $11.50
regulation issue uniform of the enlisted men. I saw him frequently in
rubber boots standing hip deep in the mud of the gun pits, talking to
the men like a father--a kindly, yet stern father who knew how to
produce discipline and results.

While at the post, he won promotion to a Major General's rank, and in
less than six months he was elevated to the grade of a full General and
was given the highest ranking military post in the United States. That
man who trained our first artillerymen in France was General Peyton C.
March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

Finding the right man for the right place was one of General March's
hobbies. He believed in military mobilisation based on occupational
qualifications. In other words, he believed that a man who had been a
telephone operator in civilian life would make a better telephone
operator in the army than he would make a gunner.

I was not surprised to find that this same worthy idea had permeated in
a more or less similar form down to the lowest ranks in General March's
command at that time. I encountered it one cold night in October, when I
was sitting in one of the barrack rooms talking with a man in the ranks.

That man's name was Budd English. I met him first in Mexico on the
American Punitive Expedition, where he had driven an automobile for
Damon Runyon, a fellow correspondent. English, with his quaint
Southwestern wit, ha