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10 Camp Funston, 1917–1920 WOOD WENT to Camp Funston on the Fort Riley Reservation convinced he had been targeted by Wilson, Baker, and the regular army hierarchy including Scott and Bliss and equally sure the British, the French, and the American people wanted him in France. The huge reservation was under a colonel and Wood asked for overall command of the base. Baker had the adjutant general inform Wood that he was in command of the Eighty-ninth training division only. When the first batch of drafted farmers arrived on September 5, Camp Funston lacked tents, barracks, blankets, and even uniforms. The 5,500 rifles stored on the base had been shipped to another training division. Wood bought 5,000 blue denim work suits so the men could dress alike, cut wooden staves to substitute for rifles, and put legs on barrels to imitate horses. The camp was on a flood plain that turned into a black, gummy morass that swallowed cars to their axles and men and horses to their bellies when it rained. Wood called it “a death trap” of infectious disease , and, in October, meningitis swept through the camp.1 Wood’s division surgeon recommended abandoning the camp altogether, but the general quarantined the ill and the epidemic faded of its own accord. Camp Funston had, however, not seen the last of its wartime epidemics. Kept out of France and denied what he needed to train his men, Wood railed against the administration and the general staff for mismanaging the war. As George Creel (Wilson’s propaganda chief) trumpeted America’s contribution to the war, Wood pointed out that the country was producing only 750 rifles a year that could fire American standard ammunition and the United States had yet to build a single military aircraft. He never understood that being right confers no license to be righteous. In October 1917, the commanding generals of the training divisions were ordered to France for a month of front line observation. Wood left for Europe hoping to convince Pershing to let him stay, but he was in 269 trouble from the outset. Wood stopped first in London where he met with the chief of British military intelligence, with Chief of Staff Sir William Robertson, and with Field Marshal Lord French. The British and French were desperate for American reinforcements but were convinced the underequipped American citizen army was months if not years from being able to function independently. They wanted American reserves to fill holes in the western front under experienced European officers. Wilson and Pershing wanted to wait until the doughboys could fight their own sectors. Wood told the British he thought small American units could be rotated to the front interspersed with seasoned British and French troops thereby serving as reinforcements while bene fiting from on-site training. The idea might have been a good one, but it was not Pershing’s. The British High Command may have appreciated Wood, but commander of the AEF decidedly did not, and rumors that the British were about to give Wood a medal precipitated a perfunctory moratorium on American soldiers accepting foreign decorations . Wood got to Paris December 13, 1917, and again inserted himself in policy discussions. His old friend Frank McCoy, hoping to promote Wood as commander of American forces attached to the British sectors, begged the general to hold his tongue. Wood ignored his advice and assured Marshal Joffre that American troops could be mixed a brigade at a time with the French. Pershing was furious. Wood spent two days in Paris before going to Major General A. B. E. Carter’s headquarters on the East Ypres salient where he spent a week in Dugout 192, a “cozy, comfortable” billet surrounded by the constant rumble of incoming and outgoing ordnance. From Ypres, Wood visited his old friend General Sir H. W. Rawlinson who brought up the delicate subject of hired sexual relief for the troops. Wood reminded Rawlinson of the scandal engendered by Pershing’s “corral” of black, white, and Mexican prostitutes during the Mexican adventure (which he assured the British officer had been “a great fizzle”)2 and huffed, “I don’t think that the mother’s [sic] of the soldiers of England want their sons to go to death from the arms of a prostitute.”3 Wood met with Jules Cambon and George Clemenceau in Paris, and, as usual, he talked too much. From Paris Wood went on to visit...

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