War today means that for every man on the fighting line there must be approximately ten men—and women—behind him in the factories, mills, and mines of the nation that enters the conflict. It is an enterprise to which military men alone have ceased to be called, for it enlists the specialists of every industry and every science from the fighting line clear back to the last line of defense.
When the American Marines were thrown into the battle line at the Marne, a French general officer rode up to headquarters.
"How deep is your front?" he asked.
"From here to San Francisco," was the reply; and in that statement lay the story of America's industrial and economic mobilization for war.
For America the actual arena of the war was 3,000 miles oversea, and into this arena the Government of the United States threw 2,000,000 of the most superb troops that the drama of warfare has known; and, what is more, got them there on time to make possible the final smashing blow. The organization, transportation, and clocklike delivery at the eleventh hour of these irresistible citizen armies of the great Republic of the western world is an epic in itself.
But here at home there were armies too. They were created without mandates; they were welded into cohesive form by suggestion rather than by order; they were galvanized from beginning to end by the mighty force of voluntary coöperation; and they went into the home stretch with a power which nothing could have stopped. These were the armies of production—production mainly, it is true, of guns and steel plates and soldiers' shoes; but production as well of energy, of thought that made the sword a flaming thing, of optimism to offset the stupid pessimism of people who criticized but had nothing tangible to contribute, of the immortal spirit of "carry on," of, above all, unification.
In all of this endeavor, in all of this uprooting of the static national life of peace time, the business man of America reached his apotheosis and surprised even himself in his ability to merge his heart and nerves and brain into the national interest in the most emergent hour of the country's history.
In effect, America went into the war unprepared. The will to war was a dormant thing throughout the nation. The country was swollen with material success almost to the point expressed in Lincoln's phrase: "A fat hound won't hunt." The evolution of the Government of the United States, enjoying profound peace for more than half a century, except for the minor military operations of the Spanish-American conflict, into a great war-making machine in mercilessly short time was a task to challenge the ability of even the most resourceful nation of the earth.
There, broadly stated, was the national picture in the spring of 1917. War came, and almost with every day grew the need for increased participation on America's part.