This means, at the moment, to try to speed up its war; to back its army to the limit; and to support or criticize every public official precisely according to whether he does or does not efficiently support its war and the army.] CHAPTER II SINS OF THE FATHERS "Sons of the sheltered city-- Unmade, unhandled, unmeet-- Ye pushed them raw to the battle As ye picked them raw from the street. And what did ye look, they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath, Knowledge unto occasion At the first far view of death?" KIPLING. While we were personally working at Plattsburg the national administration, after a meandering course, in which much of the motion was retrograde, had finally decided that to fight a war in France it was necessary to send troops to that part of the world. Out of this determination Pershing's force grew. Investigation of the condition of our military establishment indicated that we had virtually nothing available. The best that could be done in the way of an expeditionary force was to group two regiments of marines and four regular regiments together and send them to Europe as the First Division. So little attention and thought had been given to military matters that when the First Division was originally grouped it consisted of three brigades, not two. These brigades consisted of the Fifth and Sixth Marines, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth Infantry, and the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Infantry. In the regiments themselves things were in the same chaotic condition. Battalions contained three companies of infantry and one machine-gun company each. This was an eleventh-hour change from the old system of four companies of infantry, to which we returned later in the year. We had, furthermore, up to this time, by our tables of organization, companies of 152 men. These companies were raised to 200 men, and still later became 250. As a matter of fact, the strength of these companies at the declaration of war was somewhere around sixty. The 140 additional were obtained by getting a percentage by transfer from other infantry regiments, and filling in the balance with raw recruits who had just volunteered for service.