These youngsters arrived in September, and they were fighting by Thanksgiving. The next batch took appreciably less time to train, partly because the organization had been tried out and perfected on the first contingent, and partly because they were destined for a longer stay in the line before they were hauled back for training others. This process was duplicated in scores of schools throughout France, so that the Expeditionary Force, what with its reorganization to require fewer officers, and its complementary schools, never lacked for able leadership. The first school was under command of Major-General Robert Bullard, a veteran infantry officer with long experience in the Philippines to draw on, and a conviction that the proper time for men to stop work was when they dropped of exhaustion. His officers began their course with a battalion of French troops to aid them, and they were put into company formation, of about 75 men to the company, just as the humble doughboy was. They were all infantry officers, who were to take command as first and second lieutenants, but they specialized in whatever they chose. They were distinguished by their hat-bands: white for bayonet experts, blue for the liquid-fire throwers, yellow for the machine-gunners, red for the rifle-grenadiers, orange for the hand-grenadiers, and green for the riflemen. These indicated roughly the various things they were taught there, in addition to trench-digging and the so-called battalion problems, recognizable to the civilian as team-work. Their work was not of the fireside or the library. It was the joint opinion of General Pershing, General Sibert, and General Bullard that the way to learn to dig a trench was to dig it, and that nothing could so assist an officer in directing men at work as having first done the very same job himself. They had a permanent barracks which had once housed young French officers, in pre-war days, and they had a generous Saturday-to-Monday town leave. These two benefactions, plus their tidal waves of enthusiasm, carried them through the herculean programme devised by General Bullard and the assisting French officers and troops. They began, of course, with trench-digging, and followed with live grenades, machine-guns, automatic rifles, service-shells, bayonet work, infantry formation for attack, and gas tests. Then they were initiated into light and fire signals, star-shells, gas-bombing, and liquid fire. Last, they came in on the rise of the wave of rifle popularity, and trained at it even more intensively than the first of the doughboys. "The rifle is the American weapon," was General Pershing's constant reiteration, "and it has other uses than as a stick for a bayonet." But efficacious as schools of this type were, there was a need they did not meet, a need first practical, then sentimental, and equally valuable on both counts.