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.