CHAPTER I.
CANTONMENTS AND CAMPS.
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.