Finally one would land at the Advance Section depots with their complex regulating stations for the proper distribution of the material that has advanced hither by broken stages. And yet when one had journeyed thus far one would merely be at the point of the beginning of the real work of getting the stuff through to the forces without congestion, without unnecessary wastage, without sending up too much or too little but just exactly the proper amounts as needed.
Now then, on top of this please remember that each important camp, each station, each centre has its own water system, its own electric light system, its own police force, its own fire department, its own sanitary squad, its own sewers, its own walks and drives and flower beds, its own emergency hospitals and dispensaries and surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A., its own Red Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers and its own Salvation Army squad; as likely as not its own newspaper and its own theatre. Always it has its own separate communal life.
Figure that in a score of places veritable cities have sprung up where last January the wind whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden pine thickets. Figure that altogether 40,000,000 square feet of covered housing space are required and that more will be required as our expeditionary force continues to expand. Figure that in and out and through all these ramified activities our locomotives draw our cars over several hundred miles of sidings and yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has put down by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons, supplemented by a copious amount of sweat wrung from the brows of thousands of German prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese labourers imported by the French and loaned to us, and yet thousands more of native French labourers past or under the military age.
Figure that while the work of construction has been going on upon a scope unprecedented in the scheme of human endeavour the men charged with the responsibility for it have had to divide their energies and their man power to the end that the growing Army should not suffer for any lack of essential sustenance while the other jobs went forward toward completion. Figure at the beginning of last winter, nine months ago, scarcely a spadeful of earth had been turned for the foundations anywhere. Figure in with all of this mental pictures of the Children of Israel building the pyramids for old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at the Isthmus, of Cæsar's legions networking Europe with those justly celebrated Romanesque roads of his, of the coral insects making an archipelago in nine months instead of stretching the proceeding through millions of years, as is the habit of these friendly little insects; figure in all these things--and if your headache isn't by this time too acute for additional effort without poignant throbbings at the temples you may begin to have a shadowy conception of what has happened along our Service of Supplies over here in France since we really got busy.