Cold Storage Plants.
Wait! That's only a sample. The foundations are already on the ground for—now, get this; it's straight dope, no bull—for what will be the largest refrigerating cold storage plant in the world. Its construction, by the time this article sees the light of print, will be well under way. It will have a manufacturing capacity of 500 tons of ice, and will be capable of handling 2,000 tons of fresh beef daily, besides having storage space for 5,000 tons of beef additional, to say nothing of other fresh food supplies whenever they may be awaiting shipment up forward to the men in the Amexforce. [Every detail of it is absodarnlutely the last] word in uptodateness.
Along with a refrigerating plant of that magnitude, there have also been going up—going up all during the time you thought there was "nothing doing" over here, too—a number of monster storage houses for ammunition and other inflammable supplies. These are built of real old honest-to-goodness hollow fireproof brick, brought all the way from the United States. And if that were not enough to safeguard the bonbons for the Boche contained in them, the storage depot has a waterworks system all its own; to construct it, a pipe line had to be laid half a mile—the distance of the plant from the nearest body of water. Hundreds of miles of auxiliary piping have already been laid, and the water supply will be more than adequate for mechanical purposes and for protection against fire.
Regulars Lend a Hand.
The warehouses themselves are one story buildings, 50 by 30 feet in dimension, constructed in rows of fours, with loading and unloading tracks between them and with big doors in their sides, making easy the quick handling of the supplies to be stowed therein. Goods for four branches of the service are to be stored in them—machinery, ordinance supplies, medical necessaries, and all the varied articles handled by the Quartermaster's Corps. The construction of the buildings has been in the hands of a regiment of railroad engineers and a forestry regiment, assisted by companies detailed from regular regiments.
As if that were not enough in the line of construction, over in a corner of the mammoth reservation is a gas plant, and buster, too. This plant is already in operation and other plants of like size are busy in repairing machinery and in other work. Everywhere about the place there is incessant activity—regular "Hurry up Yost" speed-upativeness—in road building, well driving (some deep ones have been plugged down, too), in track laying, in hundreds of other ways.
Some plant, isn't it, to have been put up in the short time, comparatively, that we have been over here in France? It even puts into the shade the overnight growth of, say Hopewell, Va., the famous munitions city that, unlike Rome, seemed almost to have been built in a day.
Of course it has taken a tremendous force of workers to do all this, and it is going to take more and more and more as time goes on, and as more and more and more troops from the States keep pouring into the French seaports. The size of the plant, with the provisions for making it larger, prove, for one thing, that our Uncle Sam expects to send a lot more troops—and, what is more, intends to keep them well supplied with everything they need as long as they are here.
No Delay About Moving In.
Our Uncle Samuel, be it remembered, is a cautious old gent, and looks well on both sides before getting into a scrap; but once he gets in—and the canny old customer always picks the right side—he's in to stay until the whole job is cleaned up, and he's in right up to his shoulderblades. No more convincing proof of America's determination to see the thing through could be had than a sight of Uncle Sam's big storage depot and all-around tool shop. And, to clinch the argument even further, as fast as the shops on the big reservation have been put up, the machinery has been shoved into them and the work in them started as soon as the machinery was in place and oiled up.