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As soon as America had arranged to raise an army by selective conscription, the Government proceeded to provide living quarters for the soldiers to be mobilized for training.

This was a job magnificent in its proportions, carried out with a speed that was little short of magical. At 16 points, widely scattered over the country, the construction expert and the civil engineer struck the earth with their potent wands; workmen swarmed forth; the staccato of myriads of hammers and the whine of saws merged into a rolling chorus of industry; and 16 new cities arose—almost overnight, it seemed—built of wood to be sure, raw and unpainted it is true, but snug and taut and equipped with every necessary convenience known to the dwellers of modern American cities.

The United States had been wont to measure other public works by that of the Panama Canal, which had been the largest construction operation ever undertaken by America, or any other nation, prior to the great war. The construction cost of the Panama Canal was approximately $375,000,000 and the operation continued over a period of 10 years. The 16 cantonments for the National Army and the 16 camps for the National Guard cost about seven-tenths as much as the Panama Canal, but they were completed in shorter time than it takes to build an ordinary suburban dwelling house.

The science of warfare had made mighty strides since America's last great war, that of 1861 to 1865, but in no respect more than in those matters relating to the individual soldier's comfort and bodily welfare. The soldier of 1863 lived in a tent, or in the chance shelter of a billet. When the weather was cold he might alternately toast and congeal at his camp fire, and at night he rolled himself in his blanket and reposed on a pallet of straw.

His grandson warrior who went to the training camp in 1917 found life comfortable in a substantial barrack, warmed with steam heat or stoves. A good mattress on a hygienic metal bed wooed his slumbers after a hard day of training.

The soldier of 1861 bathed where he could and when he could. He of 1917 kept clean daily under the shower bath. The soldier of 1861 slaked his thirst at neighboring wells or streams; and water-borne diseases, such as typhoid fever, reaped a harvest of lives. His successor drank water which was tested and filtered, sterilized when necessary, and the once fatal epidemics of armies were kept away from his cantonment. This water, moreover, came to him in a pipe under a pressure sufficient to throw a stream from a nozzle clear over his barrack, an efficient safeguard against the fire that might destroy his wooden city.

The soldier in the Civil War washed out his own clothing on the infrequent occasions when he possessed both water and leisure. The National Army recruit received his khaki immaculate from a modern laundry equipped with the latest types of labor-saving machinery. The latter's grandfather suffered from scurvy because of the limitations of his diet. The soldier of 1917 ate tender beef and green vegetables kept fresh in ammonia-cooled refrigerators. The fighter of 1861 relished the hoecake baked in the ashes; his successor partook of white bread fresh from camp ovens.

The camps of 1861 were arranged in haphazard fashion; those of 1917 were laid out by expert city planners. In the spring the soldier of 1861 waded and toiled through mud; the soldier of 1917 walked dry-shod upon walks or drove his autotruck upon macadamized or concrete or brick camp roads. The illumination of the camps of 1861 was the light of the stars and the bivouac fires; the 1917 barracks were built along streets radiant with electrical incandescence. For amusement the soldiers of 1861 had their campfire choruses and rough military sports, but the private in the National Army had the theater, the motion picture, a library of good reading matter, the Y. M. C. A. and similar clubhouses, the gymnasium, the post exchange where he could buy periodicals, candy, fruit, and other small luxuries.

And so the contrast might be carried along. The marvel of the cantonments of 1917 was not that a grateful Republic gave to its conscripted soldiers the conveniences of existence enjoyed by all urban communities, but that it provided them in such short time. Ninety days after the first spade struck into the ground the cantonments were ready to receive two-thirds of their men, while one or two of the largest of all were complete in every essential respect.

The houses of the National Army and the National Guard went up at the rate of $2,000,000 a day. It is almost impossible to visualize this speed or to comprehend the feat of nailing fifteen hundred and some odd million board feet of lumber into place in about three months, or that of stringing wire in that time in length sufficient to reach from New York to San Francisco and back and westward again to Cleveland, or that of tacking enough rain-tight roofing paper to make a canopy for the island of Manhattan, another for Atlantic City, with nearly a square mile of it left over.

The cantonment job took so many nails and spikes that it created an actual shortage in that industry. All of the factories in the United States that make metal pipes could not turn out enough to supply the needs of the water, sanitary, and heating systems of the cantonments, and so wooden pipes made from staves were used in most of the camps for piping water.

In the matter of lumber alone it has been computed that the total amount ordered and mobilized by the Washington office for the 32 camps would build a board walk 12 inches wide and 1 inch thick to the moon and half way back again. In addition to this vast quantity of lumber there were used in the camps and cantonments about 100,000,000 square feet of wall board—wall board being universally used instead of lath and plaster to line and ceil rooms—12,000,000 square feet of window glass, and 100,000,000 square feet of roofing. The 2,000,000,000 eight-penny nails used, if placed end to end, would girdle the earth three and one-half times. The heating systems would make a single steam radiator 100 miles long, while the heating boilers were equivalent to one boiler 6 feet in diameter and 3 miles long.

The rate of the flow of materials to the army of 200,000 workmen on the cantonment jobs gives an inkling of the speed with which they put lumber and nails together to make barracks. It took 12 heavy freight trains a day, 50 loaded cars to the train, to keep wood and metal supplies at the builders' elbows. These builders erected the camps at the rate of 30,000 tons of material a day. America had never seen construction progress to equal that.

We liken swift building to the mushroom's growth, but almost always this figure of speech is used as hyperbole. Some of the feats of the cantonment builders, however, equaled the growth of the mushroom in fact. In more than one instance at spots where the sod sparkled with dew at dawn, when the builders put away their tools at sunset there stood structures roofed and inclosed, needing only a few interior touches each to be ready to shelter 200 men.

Efficiency in war is a matter of teamwork. Every vital branch of the military organization must do its part well if the whole effort is not to fail. The weak link in the chain might well have been the construction organization of the Army, for here was an emergency job on a scale beyond anything in the experience of our greatest builders. America in her first 18 months of war was able to send to France across 3,000 miles of dangerous water more men than the United Kingdom in a similar period could send to the front over the netted and laned 40 miles of English Channel. No slight share of the credit for this achievement must go to the cantonment builders, who despite great difficulties had the housing ready for the new armies when they were called forth for training.

As soon as the United States entered the war the Government sent out the call for technical experts of all sorts. For a quarter of a century the United States had been specializing in technical training for its young men, and now in the hour of need the ability existed to conduct the war, which in its first year was to be largely a matter of construction and manufacture of equipment. There was a wonderful outpouring of these men of action, the technicians who had been building the bridges and skyscrapers of the Nation, developing its mines, providing its water systems, designing its machinery, organizing and commanding its trained and untrained workers, engaging in public and private works of every description and magnitude.

The Army prior to the 6th of April, 1917, consisted of a relatively insignificant force of men. For this Army the construction of barracks and other quarters had been in the hands of the Quartermaster General.

The officer in charge of the Construction and Repair Division of the Quartermaster General's Office was relieved of his former duties and placed by the Secretary of War in charge of a new and almost entirely independent division, reporting directly to the Secretary, called the Cantonment Division, and charged with providing the necessary construction and camp facilities for the National Army and the National Guard. This was in May, 1917, at which time the commissioned personnel of the division consisted of only three officers. This step was recommended by the General Staff, acting in accordance with the advice of civilian construction experts on the Council of National Defense.

One year later the personnel of this division had grown to 263 officers and 1,100 civilians in Washington, the best constructors, engineers, draftsmen, managers, purchasing agents, and other specialists obtainable by the Government; there were hundreds of other officers and civilian experts in the field for this organization; it had an enlisted personnel of some 16,000 men and employed over 200,000 laborers and craftsmen; it had jobs on hand, complete and incomplete, aggregating $600,000,000, or nearly twice the cost of the canal at Panama, while future works then being planned and later actually undertaken came to another $600,000,000; it had now become the Construction Division of the Army, attached directly to the office of the Secretary of War, charged with all the army construction within the United States. Such was the expansion of one branch of the Army to meet the emergency. Construction operations for the Army overseas, conducted principally with troop labor, was in charge of the Corps of Engineers.

Congress passed the selective service bill on May 18, 1917. Before the end of May the military authorities had decided to call the first levies of the National Army on September 1. The little Cantonment Division, which had in the week after its birth grown to a personnel of 30 officers and numerous civilian experts, received orders to have the camps—16 complete cities to accommodate 40,000 inhabitants each and 16 tent camps, with many incidental buildings and public utilities—ready in 90 days.

Actually the time allowed for construction was much shorter than that, for the last site was not approved until July 6. About 60 days later, on September 4, the National Army cantonments were ready for 430,000 men, two-thirds of the first draft. Although some construction, subsequently authorized, was not entirely complete until later, the cantonments nevertheless were at all times prepared to receive the conscripted soldiers faster than the Army could assimilate them.

However irksome to the impatient construction officers the interval between the time when the cantonments were ordered and the day when the last sites were approved, it was not time wasted by any means. There was much preliminary work to be done. The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. Yet the Cantonment Division, with scarcely anything to start with, with not even the ground selected for a single camp site, must design and adopt types for buildings, mobilize materials, standardize everything possible, adopt an emergency contract that should protect the Government from the grafter and the profiteer, locate stores of materials, commandeering them if necessary, and also discover manufacturing plants capable of turning out supplies as rapidly as they were needed, build up an organization to handle the work in every detail, and be ready to start hammering in the nails on the day the materials arrived on the jobs. Actually these officers had something less than 20 days in which to accomplish this feat.

There had been, however, a measure of pioneering in several of these directions. The Council of National Defense had an organization of civilian experts in many lines gathered together in Washington to give advice to the military authorities. Through its committees the council prepared a form of contract upon what came to be known as the "cost-plus with sliding scale and fixed maximum fee" plan, which limited the cantonment contractor in each case to a maximum fee of not more than $250,000, the Army itself retaining control of the cost of materials and the wages paid to labor.

Since the cantonments cost anywhere from $8,000,000 to more than $12,000,000 each, the average fee to the contractor was slightly less than 2½ per cent, out of which the contractor had to pay overhead expenses, such as his main office expenses and the like; so it will be seen that the United States drove a close bargain with its cantonment builders in spite of the breathless haste to get the work done.

It was not until the 1st of June that the war authorities decided upon wood construction for the 16 National Army cantonments and canvas tentage for the 16 camps of the National Guard. According to the original plan, so far as could be foreseen, the cantonments were to be permanent camps to receive fresh contingents of selectives as long as the war should last, whereas after receiving its training the National Guard would go to France and leave its American camps deserted. The wood construction was much more expensive than tentage—amounting to $215 per man of the first draft, as it proved—but it was permanent; once installed it made no further demands for materials, and in convenience and comfort, especially in winter, it was far superior to tentage.

Meanwhile the Cantonment Division had designed a model barrack building, 43 feet wide and 140 long, to house 150 men, or one company, as the company was in the spring of 1917. Here, in the adoption of this model and general camp plans, there might easily have occurred in Washington a fatal indecision. Both the British and the French armies had found by experience that a company of 250 men was a more convenient size for trench warfare than a smaller one. There was some question whether the American Army would be guided by this experience. Gen. Pershing was to decide this matter, but he did not reach Europe until June 15. A weak executive control in Washington might have justified itself in waiting for this decision before starting in at full speed to build the cantonments. Those in charge of the program took upon themselves the responsibility of building the 150-man barrack, trusting to their own ability to adjust the buildings later to changed conditions. As a matter of fact, when the company unit was enlarged to 250 men, it was readily possible to house two companies in three barracks, leaving space in two of them for the kitchen and mess room. Still later the Construction Division built smaller barracks for 66 men each, providing four such barracks to the company.

Before a single site was selected the experts in Washington had designed the buildings and mapped out the future cities. America, leaving behind her the decorative atrocities of the old Victorian days, had been seeking beauty; and this yearning had produced a new profession, that of town planning. Town planners in the Construction Division grouped the 1,500 buildings required by each cantonment into two typical arrangements, known as the straight-line and the U-shape layouts. Later at each cantonment there was a town planner who adapted one or the other of these plans to his local camp topography.

The selection of camp sites was in the hands of boards of officers designated by the commanding officers of the six Army departments. Early in May these boards set forth on their quest. Then ensued a lively bidding on the part of American cities to secure cantonments for their own neighborhoods. The Government took the utmost advantage of such inducements as were offered. The city of Tacoma, Wash., sold its municipal bonds to the amount of $2,000,000 and with the proceeds bought 61,000 acres at American Lake and presented the land to the Army. This tract became the site of Camp Lewis, most beautiful of all the cantonments.

A DAY'S WORK IN BARRACK CONSTRUCTION.

The site for Camp Upton, at Yaphank, Long Island, 15,198 acres, was provided for the Government at an annual rental of $1 per acre. San Diego, Calif., gave 8,000 acres at Linda Vista to the Government rent free for five years. This became the location of Camp Kearney for the National Guard. Camp Fremont, another National Guard training center, was pitched on 7,203 acres of ground donated rent free for one year by the city of San Francisco. Louisville gave the site of Camp Zachary Taylor for the National Army rent free for two years. And there were numerous other similar inducements.

In all the National Army cantonments occupied 167,741 acres which the Government obtained at an average annual rental of $3.93 per acre after the second year of occupancy. The National Guard camps covered 78,639 acres, at a rental of $112,042 the second year of occupancy and thereafter.

The clearing of the sites was no mean part of the cantonment job. The site of Camp Upton at Yaphank, Long Island, proved to be covered with underbrush, and when this was cleared off it was discovered that the remains of an old forest were still there, and stumps were thickly scattered over the entire site. These had to be blasted or pulled out before any building operations could proceed. The sites in character ranged from the sandy loam of Camp Devens, in Massachusetts, to the red clay of Virginia and South Carolina; from the farm lands of Michigan to the prairie on which was built Camp Travis, Tex. Some were flat; some rolling; all were different in shape and extent; and the layout of the camp and the arrangement of the buildings in each case had to be adapted to the local conditions by the constructing quartermaster on the job.

To give a picture of a typical cantonment, let us take Camp Grant, at Rockford, Ill., as an illustration. It cost approximately $11,000,000; it could accommodate 45,000 men and 12,000 horses; its buildings numbered 1,600. Water was supplied from six wells drilled 175 feet deep. There were 38 miles of water main, while the reservoir tanks could hold 550,000 gallons. Its electric lighting system entailed the use of 1,450 miles of copper wire, 1,200 poles, and 35,000 incandescent lamps.

During the construction period 50 carloads of building material were unloaded at Camp Grant every day, and an average of 500,000 board feet of lumber was put up every day over a period of weeks. In the Camp Grant schedule we find such items as 50,000,000 feet of lumber, 700 tons of nails, 4,000,000 square feet of roofing, and 3,000,000 square feet of wall board.

Only a builder of secure financial standing could handle such a construction contract. Frequently his pay roll and current bills for supplies amounted to half a million dollars in a week. Let the Government delay a few days in its payments to him and he might find himself obliged to raise a million dollars in cash on the instant to meet his immediate obligations.

To avoid such embarrassments the Construction Division adopted the policy of paying its bills the day and sometimes the hour they were incurred. At each cantonment job it stationed a disbursing officer with a checkbook. This officer reported by telegraph each night, and the next morning there was deposited to his credit in the Treasury a sum of money sufficient for his immediate needs. On numerous occasions this officer paid for materials the instant they were unloaded from the cars and checked. The Government maintained an auditing organization at each job. This organization checked and inspected all material as it was received, comparing the delivery in each case with the original order, and counted the workmen at least twice a day.

An intense rivalry sprang up in the construction of the 16 cantonments. Sixteen teams, with an average of 10,000 men on each team, began racing for the goal, which was to be 80 per cent completion by September 5, the date when the first contingents of selective soldiers were to be received by the cantonments. It was more exciting than any campaign in any professional baseball league, because the time was shorter and the stake vastly greater. The Cantonment Division kept alive this spirit of rivalry by posting each day in each cantonment the figures showing the rates of construction at all of them. The team, from the superintendents down to the humblest unskilled laborers, discussed these ratings as fans talk about the baseball averages.

The race was a close one, being won by Camp Taylor at Louisville, which was 79.4 per cent complete on the day the contest ended, lacking only six-tenths of 1 per cent of coming up to the maximum 80 per cent of completion regarded as possible in the time available. But other construction gangs were pressing that at Camp Taylor closely: Camp Travis, with 78.6 per cent of completion at the end of the contest; Camp Lee, 78.5 complete; Camp Devens, 74; Camp Lewis, 72; and Camp Sherman, 70. The Camp Lewis percentage was taken on August 31.

All construction work, including numerous additions not contemplated in the original plans, was virtually complete by November 30. These additional structures included cantonment base hospitals, on which the Government spent $10,000,000 for the National Army and $7,500,000 at the National Guard camps. With one or two exceptions these hospitals each had facilities for 1,000 patients at once, being the largest in the United States, at that time.

At several of the cantonments the water problem was simplified by the near presence of water mains of the systems of adjacent cities. At the other camps, however, it was necessary to construct independent water systems sufficient to furnish 55 gallons of water daily to each of 45,000 men. This is nearly twice as much water as was then being furnished to the average European army camp, and it meant in each case a system of centrifugal pumps and gravity tanks with a capacity of 2,250,000 gallons daily.

The local water supply was secured either from running streams or from dug wells. If the purity of the water was in doubt it was sterilized by the chlorine process and sometimes filtered in addition. The purity of the water and the care exercised in screening kitchens, mess halls, and later the dormitories themselves, from flies is seen in the hospital record for the first year of the war. Of all the soldiers who sought hospital treatment for sickness during that first year, only one patient in 5,000 was suffering from a water-borne disease.

In each cantonment there were about 1,500 wooden buildings, presenting a constant fire menace. As a protection from such disasters each cantonment organized its own fire department with modern motor equipment stationed in three or more fire houses. The men of the fire companies were usually those who had had previous training as members of city fire departments. There was not a single serious fire at the cantonments during the war period.

Besides keeping soldiers well and clean, the camp facilities provided them with opportunity for moral and healthy amusement. Various organizations combined to supply the camps with amusement facilities. There were the library buildings, the Red Cross buildings and halls, the Y. M. C. A. buildings, the Knights of Columbus buildings, the Salvation Army buildings, Y. W. C. A. buildings, and the Jewish Welfare Board buildings.

Although the American soldier bought liberally of Liberty bonds, took out War Risk insurance, and sent to his family the greater portion of his monthly pay, still he had a small amount of money to spend for little luxuries or necessities. These included small supplies such as candy and fruits, and they were on sale at the usual post exchange or company store. This was a small building, usually with a broad covered porch or shelter around three sides, so that the men in bad weather could be dry as they waited in line for their turn at the windows. The Y. M. C. A., K. of C., Red Cross, Y. W. C. A., Jewish Welfare Board, and Salvation Army buildings offered reading and writing rooms and general gathering places; yet these were insufficient for a total camp population averaging 40,000. Hence the Commission on Training Camp Activities built through the agency of the Construction Division a Liberty Theater at each camp.

The Liberty Theaters were of temporary construction, but in size compared favorably with the largest theaters in our modern cities. To provide these amusement facilities the Construction Division put up approximately 5,000,000 board feet of lumber, 9,000,000 square feet of wall board, and 40,000 square feet of roofing.

The average large city laundry was insufficient in capacity to handle the laundry work of an average of 6,000 people per day, which was the requirement to keep some 40,000 men in clean clothing. Consequently the camps and cantonments were provided with their own laundries built by the Construction Division. This put such a demand upon the manufacturers of laundry machinery that it created a shortage, and later there was a shortage of soap and powder. The 30 laundries built used up 13,000,000 board feet of lumber and 300,000 square feet of wall board.

The householder may throw his old shoes into the trash box and sell his old suit to the ragman, but the Army threw nothing away. Consequently the Construction Division was called upon to build reclamation plants at many stations. Usually one large plant was built at a center convenient to several camps, and to this center were sent the worn-out uniforms, shoes, leggins, and all other equipment.

Every camp of considerable size in the United States was provided with model bakeries. The total capacity of all the baking equipment installed by the Construction Division would turn out 1,000 tons of bread per day. This is a total of 2,000,000 loaves of 1 pound each. Each camp bakery oven would take care of 4,500 men per day in two 8-hour shifts, or it could bake 5,000 loaves in 24 hours.

There were required at all the camps and cantonments numerous storehouses for materials to be used immediately by the troops. The Construction Division built 789 of these small storehouses at the National Army cantonments alone.

The question of cold-storage facilities for the camps offered a knotty problem. Certain camps generally relied upon cold-storage space obtained near by, or else upon refrigerator cars iced in the vicinity, but in the other camps it was necessary to build special refrigeration plants. These had an ice-making capacity ranging from 6 to 35 tons daily. The ice consumption of the American soldiers in the United States proved to be 2¾ pounds per man per day.

The kitchens in the camps and hospitals would be paradise to any woman who had drudged with old-fashioned methods and equipment in cooking. As far as possible the Army's housekeeping was done by machinery. The bread slicer in common use would cut 200 slices of bread per minute and stack the slices automatically, the loaves feeding automatically into the slicer. The meat choppers would cut up 20 pounds of meat or vegetables in five minutes, and the electrically operated potato peeler would peel 40 pounds of potatoes in three minutes. The meat slicers would cut meat at the rate of 40 slices to the minute. Vegetables were cooked and meats roasted by high-pressure steam. The vegetable cooker could turn out 35 gallons of cooked product in 15 minutes. The dish-washing machines could wash, dry, and sterilize 10,000 dishes per hour. At the hospitals the food was taken from the central kitchen to the outlying wards in mobile fireless cookers, designed to keep the food hot until served.

To prepare food for 45,000 men, 350 kitchens were required by each cantonment. The National Army in training used 9,000 hotel ranges.

In most of the cantonments, particularly those in the South, the heating of quarters in winter was accomplished by means of room heaters and cannon stoves. The constructors installed 75,000 of these. The officers' quarters everywhere and four entire cantonments in the North—Devens in Massachusetts, Grant in Illinois, Custer in Michigan, and Dodge in Iowa—were heated by steam either from central heating plants or by means of ordinary boilers such as are used in residences. The total surface of the steam radiators installed would make five gigantic stoves 300 feet square and as high as the Woolworth Building in New York.

Besides the camps and cantonments used by the line troops, the Construction Division also built various special camps required by the mobilization, training, and transportation of the Army. These included the quartermaster training camp at Jacksonville, Fla., accommodating approximately 35,000 men; and the camps for the Engineering Corps, camps for heavy and light artillery training schools, and for other special units.

Camp Joseph F. Johnston at Blackpoint, the quartermaster camp near Jacksonville, is a good example of one of these special training camps. This consisted of quarters for 150 officers, 32 barracks to house 200 men each, together with barracks for wagon companies, pack companies, truck companies, and a bakery company, as well as stables for 1,200 animals and 50 riding horses, together with storeroom buildings and truck and auto garages.

Camp Holabird, near Baltimore, used for teaching men to repair and crate motor trucks and vehicles, had accommodations for about 7,500 men. Another special camp was Camp Humphreys, for the training of men in the Corps of Engineers, located a few miles down the Potomac River from Washington. This camp could accommodate 33,000 men in 1,350 buildings located on a camp area of 2,500 acres. Every foot of this site had to be cleared of timber and underbrush during one of the severest winters of recent years. All material had to be hauled in trucks over fearful roads pending the construction of a 5-mile spur of railroad track, yet the job was completed approximately on time.

Other special camps included Camp Bragg for training Field Artillery, located at Fayetteville, N. C., with quarters for 11,000 men; Camp Knox at Stithon, Ky., for 30,000 men, having an area of nearly 60,000 acres for training troops in the use of Field Artillery; and Camp Franklin, located on part of the Camp Meade cantonment reservation, a special camp for Signal Corps instruction, with accommodations for 11,000 men.

Then there was the Coast Artillery training cantonment, Camp Eustis at Lee Hall, Va., which had accommodations for 17,000 men; Camp Meigs at Washington, D. C., a quartermaster camp, providing accommodations for 4,000 men; and Camp Benning, at Columbus, Ga., an infantry school of arms, to accommodate 5,040 men, on a camp area of 98,000 acres. At Camp Raritan, at Raritan River, N. J., the Ordnance Department established a training school for 6,250 men.

Great as was the job of building the army camps and cantonments, it was nevertheless only a part of the work which fell to the Construction Division, and much the smaller part at that.

On November 11, 1918, the Construction Division was conducting 535 building operations in 442 localities in the United States. These involved an aggregate expenditure of more than $1,000,000,000. Including the various camps and cantonments, these activities were being conducted or had been conducted in every State of the Union but one. An average of more than 200,000 workmen, principally of the building trades, had been engaged continuously for months.

In the executive administration of the work the organization required 1,487 officers and 12,355 civilian Government employees, of whom 2,555 were located at the offices of the division in Washington. Merely for the maintenance and the operation of the various completed projects a force of 16,359 enlisted men was required. In a little more than a year the organization had grown from a handful of clerks and executives to one of this size. The brigadier general who headed the Construction Division had been a Captain when war was declared.

In this period the organization had housed a population equal to that of the city of Philadelphia in 40 large camps, each in number of inhabitants comparing in size to such cities as Racine, Wis., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Wheeling, W. Va. It had constructed storage depots and warehouses that would cover 890 acres. It had built hospitals with beds for 128,378 patients. It had purchased and nailed up 2,647,605,426 board feet of lumber, enough to stretch around the Equator twenty times in boards 12 inches wide and 1 inch thick. Loaded on freight cars to their capacity this lumber would require a train reaching from Washington, D. C., to Kansas City. It had used enough brick to build an 18-foot road from Kansas City to Chicago. It had constructed 645 miles of railroads and made 1,081 miles of wagon roads, mostly of concrete. These are only a few of the high points in this building record.

There are few undertakings of mankind in all history which can be compared with this enterprise. The price paid for the Panama Canal and the Canal of Suez, the cost of damming the Nile and tunneling the Alps, and the money spent on building the Government railway into the heart of Alaska might be lumped together and still the aggregate would not equal the cost of providing the buildings, exclusive of those of the training camps, which the American Army had to have in the United States after it went to war.

We can gain a picture of the size of this construction by considering the building records of the United States. In this country there are about 150 cities large enough and ambitious enough to keep annual building statistics as the indices of their prosperity. In these cities, whose populations range in size from that of New York down to those of communities of 20,000 or 25,000 inhabitants, dwell nearly a quarter of all the Americans. They are metropolitans, the people who demand most of the builder for their comfort and luxury. Yet in no one year had the building construction in these 150 largest American cities combined approached in amount within $250,000,000 of the cost of our military construction undertaken during the war.

The Government became not only the greatest of customers for the building industry but almost the sole customer. This whole great industry, one of the largest in the country, which had been busy in its interminable task of providing the mansions of peace, was suddenly converted under military direction into a machine for building a titantic war plant. Before the Nation could mobilize its material resources or train its human ones for war it must have buildings—headquarters for its executives, barracks for its men, structures for its various arsenals for the manufacture of explosives and chemicals, warehouses for the storage of reserves of material, terminals for the transfer of overseas shipments, schools, laboratories, proving grounds for testing its weapons, hospitals, embarkation depots, and a vast number of structures for less conspicuous activities.

It was the work of the Construction Division to provide these facilities. Exclusive of the cantonments themselves, this work fell into projects ranging in size from small building groups costing a few thousand dollars to enormous powder plants, huge terminal docks, vast warehouses and other great undertakings costing $10,000,000, $16,000,000, $25,000,000, $40,000,000, and as high as $70,000,000 for a single project.

ORDNANCE CONSTRUCTION.

Perhaps the most striking of these undertakings were the various construction jobs called for by the ordnance program. There were more than 60 of these, and they ranged in cost from $100,000 up to $70,000,000.

One of the larger of these projects was that of the Aberdeen proving grounds on Chesapeake Bay, not far distant from Baltimore. This reservation, with its area of 35,000 acres and its magnificent testing and observation ranges, 75 miles in length, over the waters of the bay, will undoubtedly be retained permanently by the Government. As the plant exists to-day it has a capacity of testing 5,000 shell between daylight and dark.

At Aberdeen the Construction Division built barracks to house 8,000 men, quarters for 230 officers, and all the accessories of convenience and amusement which a community of that size should have.

Guns came to the proving grounds unassembled, so that it was necessary to build an assembly plant. This building is 165 feet wide and 500 feet long and cost $1,000,000. As an adjunct to the assembly plant there is a machine shop which is one of the largest in the United States.

Mention should be made of the 25 miles of standard railway trackage which the Construction Division put down at Aberdeen. This was exclusive of the spur tracks for the heavy guns mounted on railway carriages. These tracks approached the firing range on apparently outlandish curves and at every variety of angle. The guns were fired at these various angles to determine if the recoil would push the carriages from the track or would spread the rails.

The development of aerial bombing and the necessity for testing our own aerial bombs required the construction at Aberdeen of hangars and quarters for an aviation squadron.

In addition to these facilities, the project involved the construction of powder magazines, shell-loading plants, and warehouses. There were built 15 miles of concrete roads and 30 miles of roads of other types. Garage accommodations were provided for 100 trucks and automobiles. The firing ranges required observation towers of various sorts. The observation dugouts had to be of special strength, because certain of the tests at Aberdeen involved the actual bursting of gun barrels, making necessary specially heavy protection for the observers.

Aberdeen is equipped with a complete waterworks system and with a hospital for 250 patients. An interesting laboratory constructed on the grounds is that in which the so-called "dud" shell, or those which fail to explode, are analyzed for their defects. The Aberdeen project was started in December, 1917, and first tests were made within a month. The entire project cost over $30,000,000.

One section of the Aberdeen reservation, about 4,000 acres of it, was set apart for the uses of the gas-warfare organization of the Army and was later known as the Edgewood Arsenal. The progress at Edgewood is indicative of the manner in which chemical warfare increased in importance during our period of belligerency. It was originally estimated that $250,000 would provide a plant at Edgewood sufficient for our chemical-warfare needs. The actual cost of the Edgewood Arsenal at the date of the armistice, so great had been the expansion of chemical warfare, was about $43,000,000. At that time there had been constructed or were in process of construction filling plants that could turn out 120,000 loaded gas shell per day. The equipment at Edgewood includes a cantonment for 10,000 men, some of it of permanent construction. There were built 10 miles of macadam road at Edgewood and 15 miles of railway, in addition to large warehouses and a dock where loaded shell could be freighted upon lighters to deep water.

Another project made necessary by the expansion of chemical warfare was the gas proving grounds at Lakehurst, N. J., the entire project costing $1,500,000. The site of 5,000 acres provided space for two target ranges, each 4 miles long. Extensive laboratories were built at Lakehurst, and the proving ground was operated by a force of 1,500 men. In addition to this there was located at Lakehurst a camp for 3,400 troops in training. All buildings for these facilities were provided by the Construction Division.

In addition to Aberdeen and Lakehurst the Construction Division built a proving ground at Clear Springs, Md., used for testing out 37-millimeter guns; another such institution at Port Clinton, Ohio, for testing 155-millimeter and 240-millimeter howitzers; and others at Scituate, Mass., and Savanna, Ill. The combined cost of these last four projects was $6,507,520.

One important undertaking of the Construction Division was that of providing warehouse depots for ordnance materials. These supplies differ from ordinary Army supplies in the important particular that they must be treated gently and handled with care. A quartermaster storehouse can be of emergency construction type, that is, more or less built of wood, but an ordnance storehouse, since it usually contains high explosives, must be strictly fireproof. In undertaking the creation in record time of a number of ordnance depots the Construction Division faced not only the problem of the type of building required but also the location of these buildings. It was necessary to locate them at deep water in order to avoid frequent handling of the high explosives, yet no depot could be situated in any thickly settled center because of the danger to the civilian population. At most deep-water points on the Atlantic coast which had railway connections the available sites were already occupied. The result was that the ordnance depots had to be built on marshes and meadows, on land which for construction purposes had always been regarded as impossible. Yet they had to be completed in as much of a rush as any buildings which the Army demanded.

There are now five of these great ordnance depots on the Atlantic coast built by the Construction Division: at Metuchen, N. J.; Curtis Bay, Md.; Pig Point, Va.; Charleston, S. C.; and Pedricktown, Del. The largest of these is the one at Metuchen, known as the Raritan Arsenal. The Raritan site contains about 2,200 acres of salt marsh. High tides used to submerge the whole area almost completely. Before any building could be started the Construction Division had to build a dike 9 miles long around the whole reservation. The entire project was perched on piles, and these piles, by the tens of thousands, were driven into the frozen ground during the severe winter of 1917-18. Labor was hard to get and hard to keep. After the laborers' quarters had been built and a few powder magazines had been erected, it became almost impossible to keep men on the job because of the danger of working in a powder arsenal.

Most of the Raritan buildings are of terra-cotta construction. There are 85 completed magazines, each 51 feet wide and 218 feet long, for the storage of shell, black powder, and miscellaneous items, this number not including 12 magazines of sheet-metal construction, each 26 by 42 feet, for the storage of high explosives. When the armistice was signed the Construction Division was building 60 similar magazines intended for the storage of smokeless powder.

At Raritan was also located a school of instruction for ordnance troops, with a cantonment to accommodate 10,000 men. A 150-bed hospital was part of the equipment, as was also an assembly shop and a motor-instruction school.

Along the river a dock was built 2,000 feet long. On the dock were constructed several huge warehouses for the storage of material. Fifty miles of railway were constructed. The project on the armistice date was probably the best equipped ordnance depot in the world. It cost about $14,000,000.

The next largest ordnance depot is that at Curtis Bay near Baltimore. It is half the size of the Raritan project and cost about $7,000,000.

The Pig Point ordnance depot is located at Hampton Roads, about 12 miles from Portsmouth, Va. In order to obtain berthing facilities for trans-Atlantic ships it was necessary to build a dock more than a mile long out to deep water. The dock is said to be the longest wharf in the United States south of Philadelphia. The Pig Point job cost about $3,500,000.

The Charleston Arsenal cost $5,000,000; while $7,000,000 was the amount provided for the arsenal at Pedricktown. The Pedricktown job, however, was started late, and not over $2,000,000 had been spent when the armistice was signed.

In addition to these five terminal depots the Construction Division provided two other ordnance warehouses for the storage of miscellaneous supplies—one at Middletown, Pa., costing $1,250,000, and the other at Augusta, Ga., costing $250,000.

The description of the powder bag-loading plants, which were built by the Construction Division, is contained in the chapter of this report relating to the production of powder and other explosives. There were three of these plants, one located at Woodbury, N. J., another at Tullytown, Pa., and the third on the historic battle ground at Seven Pines, Va. Since these plants were perforce located at isolated places it was necessary in each case to provide housing accommodations for the workers, many of whom were women. The Construction Division built the houses at Tullytown and Woodbury while those at Seven Pines were provided by the United States Industrial Housing Corporation.

These bag-loading plants cost from $4,500,000 to $6,000,000 apiece, and they were erected in a remarkably short time. Work was started on the Woodbury project on March 19, 1918, and the plant was ready for operation on May 28, although the plant did not actually start operating until June 15. The spade was first struck into the ground at Tullytown on March 6, 1918, and on July 17 the 250 buildings of the project were ready. The work at Seven Pines began April 24, and the plant was ready for operation on August 24, 1918.

AVIATION SCHOOLS AND TESTING FIELDS.

The Signal Corps, needing a special type of construction, undertook the work itself at the start of war, but by October, 1917, the Construction Division had proved itself so efficient that all Army building work in the United States, including that of the Signal Corps, was turned over to it. The work for the Signal Corps entailed the construction of the necessary buildings for flying fields, testing fields, aerial photography, and gunnery schools, balloon observation schools, repair and testing shops, and tremendous storage depots that had to be of special fireproof construction because of the inflammable nature of the oil and other materials used by the Signal Corps.

At the aviation fields a special type of portable hangar built of steel, 65 by 140 feet, was adopted. For the big bombing planes larger hangars were required but of the same-type of construction. At each aviation field were barracks for a large number of men, together with water and sanitary conveniences. There were 31 of these fields located principally in the West or Southwest.

In addition to these there were four testing fields for the aircraft service, located in the eastern half of the United States where the flying machines and the engines were being produced. One of these was at Dayton, another at Buffalo, a third at Detroit, and a fourth at Elizabeth, N. J. The aerial gunnery school at Miami, Fla., was one of the largest of the aviation-construction projects. This plant included buildings, target ranges, steel hangars, photographic laboratories and other equipment—all built at a cost of $1,500,000.

The balloon school at Lee Hall, Va., cost $1,000,000, and that at Arcadia, Calif., $500,000. At each of these schools there were barracks for the men, quarters for the laborers, and experimental buildings, not to speak of the huge sheds, 200 or more feet in length, in which the balloons were housed.

QUARTERMASTER BASES AND WAREHOUSES.

Construction for the Quartermaster Department involved the building of warehouses on a scale hitherto unknown in the United States. The warehouse plan was carefully worked out as part of the strategy of conducting the war, the Council of National Defense making the first investigations of the proper locations of supply depots, and these early findings being later amended by the General Staff. Several important considerations determined the locations of these depots and warehouses. In the first place we would require great storage and shipping facilities at tidewater; yet, if these were all to be located in one spot or in one general region, there was a possibility that a submarine blockade off the Atlantic coast could stop the shipment of supplies to the American Expeditionary Forces. Thus the first project was to locate the great supply bases at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Norfolk. But it was evident that a relatively small number of enemy submarines operating in a comparatively restricted area could block shipment from these four ports. Therefore Charleston, S. C., and New Orleans were added to the supply-base project.

There was another thing to be taken into consideration, namely, the providing of sufficient warehouse space, so that, if there should be any blockade of ocean transportation, the manufacture of supplies could continue at its war rate and still find places to which to ship its important products. Yet if the storage were all provided at the tidewater bases, there would be danger of railroad congestion at the ports. Consequently, as auxiliary to the terminal warehouses, there was provided a system of enormous warehouses built in the interior of the United States.

The system eventually worked out to give seven expeditionary supply bases located, six of them, at the cities just named, in addition to one that had been built at Port Newark, N. J., during the winter of 1917, and nine interior depots located respectively at Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Jeffersonville, Ind., New Cumberland, Pa., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Schenectady, N. Y., and St. Louis. These latter were central in various producing districts.

The terminal projects alone involved construction on a scale that was without precedent. The interior depots and the huge terminal bases provided 690 acres of storage space, all inclosed in reinforced concrete of the most modern type. They were all built in a little over 12 months. Into them went construction enough to build a concrete building 70 feet wide from New York to Philadelphia and a wharf nearly 8 miles long, with berthing accommodations for 65 ships at once. The facilities included 650 miles of railroad and 1,000 miles of concrete roadway.

The Army supply bases at Brooklyn and at Boston are examples of the immensity of the expeditionary depots built along the Atlantic seacoast. The base at Brooklyn has approximately 4,000,000 square feet of storage space in its two huge 8-story reinforced concrete warehouses. One of these warehouses is 980 feet long by 200 feet wide and the other is 980 feet long by 300 feet wide. In addition to these, the installation at the base consists of three double-deck piers, each 150 feet wide and 1,300 feet long, and one open pier 60 feet wide and 1,300 feet long. In its railroad yards there is storage space for 1,300 cars at one time. The capacity of the base is 700,000 tons of supplies, or the equivalent of about 100 shiploads. Twelve ships of 8,000 tons, dead weight each, can be loaded at one time, and the loading of these vessels can be completed within 24 hours, so vast and complete are the facilities at this project.

Construction started at the site on May 15, 1918. More than 7,000 workmen were engaged on this job at one time, and the entire project was to be completed before July 1, 1919, while it was to be in partial operation by January 1. When the armistice was signed, 4,387,360 square feet of floor space had been completed and 187,173 cubic yards of concrete had been poured.

The base at Boston is 8 stories high, built of concrete, and gives 2,750,000 feet of storage room. Its wharves are 4,000 feet long. The work on it was started May 14, 1918, and ended October 3. In that time 200,000 cubic yards of concrete had been poured, 22,000 tons of reinforcing and structural steel put into position, 3,000,000 brick laid, 30,000 piles driven, 1,500,000 cubic yards dredged, and 30 miles of track laid. In all, 7,000 carloads of material were handled in this building.

The Norfolk base is located at Bush Bluff, 4 miles from the city. The chief feature of this project is a group of eight 1-story concrete buildings providing 2,000,000 square feet of storage space. The pier sheds are built of concrete blown by compressed air upon steel lath. The docks total a mile in length. The base can handle 600 cars of supplies in a day. In addition to the storage and shipping buildings themselves, the Construction Division provided quarters for a regiment of stevedores and a battalion of guards. A 120-bed hospital was erected at the project. The wharfage front was made of concrete piles weighing 12 tons apiece, and 217 acres of land were made by dredging outside of the piles and filling in behind them. The work was started in May and was nearly finished when the armistice was signed.

The Norfolk and Hampton Roads district has the distinction of being the center of more war construction than was conducted at any other point in the United States. There were located here the Navy arsenal, the Navy yard, the Navy training station, and the great Norfolk naval base. The largest construction project of all at Norfolk was the quartermaster terminal which the Construction Division built there. But in addition to these there was the Pig Point ordnance depot, described above, Camp Stuart and Camp Hill, both embarkation camps, the Artillery school at Fortress Monroe, Camp Eustis, and the Langley aviation field of the Army.

With so many construction undertakings going on at once, the labor problem proved to be an early embarrassment at the Norfolk quartermaster terminal job. However, good quarters and good food for the construction gangs at the terminal largely solved this problem. At one time in the development on the shores of this part of Chesapeake Bay, the street car and electric lighting system of Norfolk broke down under the strain. The Government thereupon took the power house and operated it thereafter for the duration of the emergency.

The interior storage depots of the Quartermaster Department provide 12,000,000 square feet of storage. They are all of permanent construction. They range in size from the one at Pittsburgh, with 184,000 square feet, to that at Schenectady with 2,500,000 square feet.

The depot at Chicago was built by the Central Manufacturing District as contractor on a site sold by its trustees to the Government. This structure, costing $3,000,000 and giving 29 acres of storage, was built completely in the period between March 4 and September 15, 1918.

MOTOR TRANSPORT CONSTRUCTION.

There was extensive construction for the Motor Transport Corps. Few civilians perhaps realize the size attained by this branch of the Army, with its more than 3,000 officers and 100,000 men in the United States and abroad. The Construction Division designed a standardized repair shop to be used in this country or to be transported overseas as desired. There were three centers of repair, shipment, and the training of men for the Motor Transport Service, the largest being Camp Holabird at Baltimore and the others, Camp Jesup at Atlanta, and Camp Normoyle at San Antonio, Tex.

When the armistice was signed the Army had in this country thousands of motor trucks, motorcycles, and ambulances. Perhaps 80 per cent of these were located in the districts subsidiary to Camp Holabird. Consequently, there were constructed at Holabird an enormous repair shop and a shop for the taking down and shipping of motor vehicles. The machine shops at these camps were of permanent construction. Large storage facilities were also furnished.

The experiences of the Army in Mexico taught that to be effective motor transport must have adequate facilities for repair. The standardized army repair shop is of glass, steel, and concrete construction. It is operated by 55 officers and 1,400 men.

One of the most interesting buildings provided for the Motor Transport Corps was the crating shop at Camp Holabird. The first motor trucks sent overseas were shipped completely assembled. In addition to taking up unnecessarily much-needed cargo space on the transports, they frequently arrived in poor condition, due to the effects of the salt air upon their metal parts.

Consequently, it was decided to ship trucks disassembled in crates. One of these huge vehicles could be taken apart and, except for its truck body, wrapped up in a parcel 20 feet long, 40 inches wide and 40 inches deep. The truck body could be packed in a crate 12 feet long and 6 feet wide and 1 foot thick. These crates were moisture proof.

The crating of trucks saved 75 per cent of the ship space formerly required. The crating crews became so facile that they could take down and pack in a single day from a mile and a half to two miles of trucks. This unique shop cost $500,000.

The construction at Camp Holabird started February 4, 1918. The camp now occupies 144 acres and has a cantonment for 7,000 men. The 22 buildings of an abandoned distillery on the ground were remodeled to serve as permanent storehouses for the millions of dollars' worth of tools and motor-vehicle parts which the Government acquired in the war.

ARMY HOSPITALS.

For the Surgeon General's Department the Construction Division constructed hospitals in this country providing accommodations for a total of 121,000 patients, 12,000 nurses, 4,000 doctors, and 34,000 hospital operation and maintenance troops. There were 294 of these hospitals in all, built at a total cost of $127,725,000 and divided into three types: base hospitals located at the various training camps, departmental hospitals located at various other Army posts, and general hospitals for the reception of sick and wounded men returning from France. The construction of general hospitals did not cease with the signing of the armistice, and at a recent date it had provided 97,000 beds for patients.

The builders adopted a standardized type of hospital construction. The unit in this type was a single-story ward building of frame construction lined in the interior with gypsum board or some similar material. An open porch along the entire length of one side of the ward building provided opportunity for convalescents to be wheeled outdoors. Each ward had room for 34 beds and also had a diet kitchen, a nurses' room, a doctors' room, lavatories, and an inclosed solarium at the end. These buildings were connected with each other by inclosed corridors running through the clear. At the Fox Hills Hospital, Staten Island, N. Y., there was a mile and a quarter of this corridor construction. The corridors in each case fed in toward the central administration group of buildings in which were located the operating rooms and the various laboratories.

As crews developed their teamwork some marvelous instances of speed were shown in putting up the buildings. One crew of 566 men at Fox Hills erected a complete hospital wing in one working day. At 7 o'clock in the morning the ground of the site was untouched. That night at 6 o'clock a 40-bed ward was standing finished on the site—painted, equipped with heating and ventilating apparatus, all plumbing installed, the last electric bulb screwed in, and in every respect ready for occupancy. It was like magic; yet soon thereafter the Construction Division had set the period of 10 hours as the standard time for building one of these wings.

General Hospital No. 3 located at Otisville, N. Y., has a capacity of 579 beds and is a complete military hospital plant designed for the treatment of tubercular cases. A short summary of the work done upon it will give an idea of the general nature of the construction problems incident to the building of the military hospitals during the winter and spring of 1918.

On February 2, 1918, the Constructing Quartermaster with a few officers and clerks arrived at the site of the hospital, about 37 acres of land, near the village of Otisville, Orange County, N. Y., on the southern slope of Shawangunk Mountain. The contractor and his organization came on the same day. They found the site covered with snow and with no accommodations even for the office force of the Constructing Quartermaster or the contractor, except an old creamery building, which was promptly rented and into which the two organizations moved the next day.

Actual work was started February 5 and continued through every severity of weather until the project was completed in the early part of July. The work was interrupted, hindered, and hampered by snow and mud, by transportation congestion preventing the delivery of materials on time, by the absence of local labor and the necessity for importing labor from near-by markets wherever it could be procured, and by the consequent necessity for running special trains to transport laborers to and from the job. No local facilities existed for housing any of the workmen, and temporary accommodations had to be built to accommodate 200 Italian laborers both in the matter of shelter and food.

The average height above sea level of the site of this hospital is a little over 1,000 feet. It was found after construction began that the site was full of springs, which caused further trouble and difficulty in developing the building operations.

The cost of the project was $1,681,000. About 300 carloads of material were used, including approximately 3,000,000 feet of lumber. The largest number of laborers employed at any one time was 1,795, with a working day, as a rule, of nine hours, union and nonunion labor being employed without discrimination. Water supply, sewer construction, roads, 330 feet of railway siding, sewage disposal plant, electrical installation, and boiler houses, all had to be built. The work was all completed early in July, 1918. In addition to the bed capacity of the hospital, accommodations were provided for a hospital personnel of 224.

One of the largest hospitals involving entirely new construction is General Hospital No. 21, Denver, Colo. This is also a hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis cases. The construction is permanent, hollow tile and stucco, and the hospital facilities are sufficient to accommodate 2,000 beds for recuperative and curative work. The plant consists of hospital wards, tuberculosis wards, officers' quarters, nurses' quarters, mess halls, storehouses, laundry, schoolhouse, power house, water and sewer installation, and all of the necessary utilities for the adequate operation of a completely self-contained unit.

The original authorization covered only 1,000 beds. Subsequently there was authorized an addition equally as large, and the entire project was completed on March 1, 1919. The actual capacity of the hospital is in excess of the capacity estimated when the work was begun, and it is estimated that 2,486 patients can be cared for, the cost per bed running less than $1,350. In view of the nature and character of the permanent construction involved, and the fact that this is a military hospital with the usual numerous construction details not found in civilian hospitals, the construction at this figure is regarded as exceptional.

INCIDENTS OF THE WORK.

When the Government undertook the whole enormous military construction program, it was found that there were few builders in the United States who had equipment enough to handle the bigger jobs. Consequently the Construction Division adopted the policy of acquiring equipment of various sorts, usually paying rent for it. Such equipment included locomotive cranes, concrete mixers, locomotives for trench machines, road machinery, and other heavy apparatus. This equipment was rented under an agreement that whenever the rent paid had aggregated the cost of the article rented, the latter should become the property of the Government. In this way the Government has acquired property of this sort worth about $3,000,000.

The Construction Division at all times procured raw materials for the contractors engaged upon the projects. During the summer of 1918 the division was procuring material at an average rate of nearly $1,000,000 per day.

There were many interesting incidents in connection with this activity. In the summer of 1917, when the cantonments were going up, it became necessary to provide some 60,000 stoves and heaters, yet there were not that many stoves for sale in the country including all existing stocks, nor was the capacity of the various stove works sufficient to make up the number in the three months' period before the soldiers would be going to the camps. Accordingly, officers of the division were sent out to make addresses to the workmen at the stove factories, and as a result of such efforts the companies speeded up their output until they were able to supply all of the camps with heating facilities by October 1, 1917. In this effort the Government went into the market and procured the pig iron, coke, and other supplies for the stove foundries.

The Construction Division was also able to obtain 15,000 Army kitchen ranges in three months, although that number is a normal year's output of the entire manufacturing facilities of the country.

When the project for the expeditionary supply base at Port Newark was taken up—in the late fall of 1917—the Construction Division set about it to get 63,377 piles for the foundations of this construction. There were 64 pile drivers on the job, driving in a total of 1,566 piles in a day; and to supply these the woodsmen of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and New Jersey were called upon for their best efforts. Due to the unforeseen severity of the winter, the rivers were frozen and the railroads choked with freight. Near by was the Hog Island shipbuilding project at Philadelphia, needing more piles than the railroads could deliver. The trees in the woods were frozen and often broke to pieces when they fell. In the southern logging districts the negro woodsmen refused to stay on the job because of the cold. The Construction Division then took hold, sent soldiers into the woods, felled the trees, and then put guards on the cars of piling, to see that they were not lost in transit. As a result, the piles for the Port Newark job were delivered on time.

In addition to procuring materials for its own contractors, the Construction Division also procured building materials for the Shipping Board and for the Bureau of Industrial Housing. The peak load of labor on the Army construction jobs came in the summer of 1918, when 230,000 men were on the pay roll, drawing $7,626,800 a week in pay, and still the jobs were short 150,000 unskilled men. In general, the union scale of wages and hours of labor were adopted, but the open shop was maintained. Labor troubles were infrequent and not serious. To prevent strikes the Government formed the Cantonment Adjustment Commission, consisting of three members, the Army representative being Col. J. H. Alexander, of the Construction Division. Of all the strikes that hampered our war activities, less than 1 per cent were strikes of the building trades.

When the labor shortage of 1918 was most acute the Construction Division turned to Porto Rico and the Bahamas for unskilled labor, importing 2,600 Bahamans and 13,000 Porto Ricans. This imported labor was exclusively used on southern building projects and was sent back home when the armistice was signed.

The Construction Division had charge of the operation and maintenance of the utilities of the various training camps, a work requiring a force of 452 officers and 16,559 men. In all there were 54,808 buildings at these camps to be kept in repair. This was done at the cost of $8.10 a year for each man housed. The Government supplied electricity to the camps at an average cost of $0.02½ per kilowatt hour. In a single year of operation, the 32 camps burned about 2,000,000 tons of coal for heating. This was at a cost of approximately $10 per man.

The utilities of the camps were under the management of men who could qualify to be city managers. They had the operation of water systems, fire departments, and other common conveniences of cities. Water was supplied at the rate of 55 gallons daily per man. The purity of the water and the adequacy of the sanitation may be gauged from the fact that in July and August, 1918, the annual death rate at the camps was 2.8 per thousand. In our Mexican War the annual death rate of American troops from disease was 110 per thousand; in the Civil War it was 65 per thousand; in the Spanish War 26 per thousand; and among Japanese troops in the Russo-Japanese War it was 25 per thousand. The death rate in civil life for men of the draft age is 6.7 per thousand.

Each camp and cantonment was adequately protected by fire companies equipped with the most modern apparatus, nearly all of it motorized. Each camp fire company had 60 men. A low annual fire loss in civil life is $2 per capita. In 1917, 20 American cities of about 31,000 population each showed an annual fire loss of $2.15 per capita. The average for the United States is $2.42 per capita. At the training camps, in spite of their inflammable construction, the average annual loss from fire per capita was only 46 cents.

[40] Part of General Hospital No. 10, Boston, Mass.