have 35,000 motor
propelled vehicles and a personnel of 160,000 men.

Every effort is being made to employ labour-saving devices to
the fullest extent. The Supply Department expects to cut down its
personnel by two-thirds through the efficient use of machinery and
derricks. The order compelling all packages to be standardized in
different graded sizes, so that they can be forwarded directly to
the Front before being broken, has already done much to expedite
transportation. The dimensions of the luggage of a modern army can
be dimly realized when it is stated that the American armies will
initially require twenty-four million square feet of covered and
forty-one million of unroofed storage--not to mention the barrack
space.

Within the next few months they will require bakeries capable of
feeding one million and a quarter men. These bakeries are divided
into: the field bakeries, which are portable, and the mechanical
bakeries which are stationary and on the line of communications. One
of the latter had just been acquired and was described to me when I
was in the American area. It was planned throughout with a view to
labour-saving. It was so constructed that it could take the flour off
the cars and, with practically no handling, convert it into bread
at the rate of 750,000 lbs. a day. This struck me as a peculiarly
American contribution to big business methods; but on expressing this
opinion I was immediately corrected. This form of bakery was a British
invention, which has been in use for some time on our lines. The
Americans owed their possession of the bakery to the courtesy of the
British Government, who had postponed their own order and allowed the
Americans to fill theirs four months ahead of their contract.

This is a sample of the kind of discovery that I was perpetually
making. Two out of three times when I thought I had run across a
characteristically American expression of efficiency, I was told that
it had been copied from the British. I learnt more about my own army's
business efficiency in studying it secondhand with the Americans,
than I had ever guessed existed in all the time that I had been an
inhabitant of the British Front. It is characteristic of us as a
people that we like to pretend that we muddle our way into success.
We advertise our mistakes and camouflage our virtues. We are almost
ashamed of gaining credit for anything that we have done well. There
is a fine dishonesty about this self-beli