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.