rtain 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.

I arrived there at night. There was no town. One stepped from the
train into the open country. Far away in the distance there was a
glimmering of fires and the scarlet of sparks shooting up between
bare tree-tops. My first impression was of the fragrance of pines and,
after that, as I approached the huts, of a memory more definite and
elusively familiar. The swinging of lanterns helped to bring it back:
I was remembering lumber-camps in the Rocky Mountains. The box-stove
in the shack in which I slept that night and the roughly timbered
walls served to heighten the illusion that I was in America. Next
morning the illusion was completed. Here were men with mackinaws and
green elk boots; here were cook-houses in which the only difference
was that a soldier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman; and above
all, here were fir and pines growing out of a golden s