existing; by lightening the tonnage to be shipped from the States by buying everything that is procurable in Europe.  In the early months much of the available Atlantic tonnage was occupied with carrying the materials of construction:  rails, engines, concrete, lumber, and all the thousand and one things that go to the housing of armies.  This accounts for America’s delay in starting fighting.  For three years Europe had been ransacked; very much of what America would require had to be brought.  Such work does not make a dramatic impression on other nations, especially when they are impatient.  Its value as a contribution towards defeating the Hun is all in the future.  Only victories win applause in these days.  Nevertheless, such work had to be done.  To do it thoroughly, on a sufficiently large scale, in the face of the certain criticism which the delay for thoroughness would occasion, demanded bravery and patriotism on the part of those in charge of affairs.  By the time this book is published their high-mindedness will have begun to be appreciated, for the results of it will have begun to tell.  The results will tell increasingly as the war progresses.  America is determined to have no Crimea scandals.  The contentment and good condition of her troops in France will be largely owing to the organisation and care with which her line of communications has been constructed.

The purely business side of war is very dimly comprehended either by the civilian or the combatant.  The combatant, since he does whatever dying is to be done, naturally looks down on the business man in khaki.  The civilian is inclined to think of war in terms of the mobile warfare of other days, when armies were rarely more than some odd thousands strong and were usually no more than expeditionary forces.  Such armies by reason of their rapid movements and the comparative fewness of their numbers, were able to live on the countries through which they marched.  But our fighting forces of to-day are the manhood of nations.  The fronts which they occupy can scarcely boast a blade of grass.  The towns which lie behind them have been picked clean to the very marrow.  France herself, into which a military population of many millions has been poured, was never at the best of times entirely self-supporting.  Whatever surplus of commodities the Allies possessed, they had already shared long before the spring of 1917.  When America landed into the war, she found herself in the position of one who arrives at an overcrowded inn late at night.  Whatever of food or accommodation the inn could afford had been already apportioned; consequently, before America could put her first million men into the trenches, she had to graft on to France a piece of the living tissue of her own industrial system—­whole cities of repair-shops, hospitals, dwellings, store-houses, ice-plants, etc., together with the purely business personnel that go with them.  These cities, though initially planned to maintain and furnish a minimum number of fighting men, had to be capable of expansion so that they could ultimately support millions.