to do over here is likely to be small in comparison with the ones we’ve had to tackle in America.”  The man who said this had previously done his share in the building of the Panama Canal.  There were others I met, men who had spanned rivers in Alaska, flung rails across the Rockies, built dams in the arid regions, performed engineering feats in China, Africa, Russia—­in all parts of the world.  They were trained to be undaunted by the hugeness of any task; they’d always beaten Nature in the long run.  Their cheerful certainty that America in France was more than up to her job maintained a constant wave of enthusiasm.

It may be asked why it is necessary in an old-established country like France, to waste time in enlarging harbours before you can make effective war.  The answer is simple:  France has not enough ports of sufficient size to handle the tonnage that is necessary to support the Allied armies within her borders.  America’s greatest problem is tonnage.  She has the men and the materials in prodigal quantities, but they are all three thousand miles away.  Before the men can be brought over, she has to establish her means of transport and line of communications, so as to make certain that she can feed and clothe them when once she has got them into the front-line.  There are two ways of economising on tonnage.  One is to purchase in Europe.  In this way, up to February, The Purchasing Board of the Americans had saved ninety days of transatlantic traffic.  The other way is to have modern docks, well railroaded, so that vessels can be unloaded in the least possible space of time and sent back for other cargoes.  Hence it has been sane economy on the part of America to put much of her early energy into construction rather than into fighting.  Nevertheless, it has made her an easy butt for criticism both in the States and abroad, since the only proof to the newspaper-reader that America is at war is the amount of front-line that she is actually defending.

I had heard much of what was going on at a certain place which was to be the intermediate point in the American line of communications.  I had studied a blue-print map and had been amazed at its proportions.  I was told, and can well believe, that when completed it was to be the biggest undertaking of its kind in the world.  It was to be six and a half miles long by about one mile broad.  It was to have four and a half million feet of covered storage and ten million feet of open storage.  It was to contain over two hundred miles of track in its railroad yard and to house enough of the materials of war to keep a million men fully equipped for thirty days.  In addition to this it was to have a plant, not for the repairing, but merely for the assembling of aeroplanes, which would employ twenty thousand men.