CHAPTER VI.
SALVAGE.
Tables of statistics are apt to be tiresome affairs; but in the annals of the War Department, as part of the record of the American Army in the great war, there is a table of statistics that is replete with human interest. This is the table which depicts the activities of the salvage operations of the Army, both at home and abroad.
Until the war came to America and brought to us the necessity of being provident, thrift and economy could not be called characteristic American qualities. As virtues in the individual we were apt to despise them. Paris can live on what New York throws away, runs the old saying. For the prudent man we invented opprobrious names. Such names and phrases were but the surface outcroppings of a national tendency to be wasteful.
But the war came along to put a stop to waste and to raise thrift high in the esteem of America. Partly because of the mounting prices of food and clothing and partly because of well-organized and well-conducted propaganda on the part of various agencies of the Government, chief among them being the United States Food Administration and the Liberty Bond and War Saving Stamp organizations of the Treasury Department, America began to practice economy in the use of materials.
How much of the credit for the change can be claimed by the Government itself we may never know; but this may be said—in urging the people to save materials in their own homes, the Government did not, as it had done in previous wars, allow the traditional wastes of military campaigns. The Government practiced what it preached. It cleaned up its own back yard and utilized every scrap of useful material. It mended the shoes and clothing of the Army; it darned the socks; it tinkered the tin cans; it starved the garbage pails by economy in the mess kitchens and recovered the valuable components of garbage at rendering plants; it collected the junk; it swept the stables and put the manure on the land, and then produced crops from the increased fertility. All of these adventures in conservation and reclamation were known to the Army simply as Salvage; which after all was but the scientific attention which the Army paid to the "p's" and "q's" of military housekeeping—it was household economy on the scale of a family of 3,500,000 members.
The figures of the Army's thrift are most impressive. The figures of our war salvage are as follows:
| Depots and shops. | Kitchen economics branch. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month. | Value of output. | Month. | Recoveries. |
| January | No record. | May | $1,350.65 |
| February | No record. | June | 17,881.03 |
| March | $850,000.00 | July | 74,167.31 |
| April | 900,000.00 | August | 23,581.20 |
| May | 1,500,000.00 | September | 35,677.03 |
| June | 2,000,000.00 | October | 109,013.84 |
| July | 3,500,000.00 | November | 120,158.63 |
| August | 5,500,000.00 | December | 92,685.43 |
| September | 7,251,512.40 | Total | 474,515.12 |
| October | 8,007,980.39 | ||
| November | 8,072,042.08 | ||
| December | 9,436,839.14 | ||
| Total | 47,018,374.01 | ||
| October | $8,000,000.00 |
| November | 4,000,000.00 |
| December | 3,100,000.00 |
| Total | 15,100,000.00 |