A great friend of mine, Colonel Frederick Palmer, put this to me very clearly. He was observing the action of our troops in the Argonne and came on a young lieutenant with a platoon of infantry. The lieutenant was fidgeting and highly nervous. When Palmer came up he said, "Sir, there is a machine gun on that hill. I don't know whether I should attack it or whether I should wait until the troops on the right and left arrive and force it out. I don't know whether it is killing my men to no purpose whatever to advance. I don't know what to do. I am not afraid. My men are not afraid." This man belonged to one of the newly arrived divisions. Given the experience, he would have known exactly what to do. If he had been a man of an older division and had seen sufficient service he would have been doing what was necessary when Colonel Palmer arrived. The little tricks which come only with soldiering and training, which do not appear in the accounts of the battles and are never found in the citations for valor, are those which make the great difference. For example, Napoleon has said that an army travels on its stomach. It is often quoted and rarely understood, yet nothing is more true. The men have had a hard day's fighting. They are wet, they are cold, they have marched for a week, mostly at night, and are worn out. Can you get the food forward to them? Can you get the food to them hot? If you can get hot food forward to them you have increased the fighting efficiency of these troops thirty per cent. Experienced troops get this food forward. A machine working on past experience knows exactly what to do. The supply trains keep track of their advance units and follow closely in their rear. During the engagement the supply officers are planning where to put their rolling kitchens and what routes can be used to get the supplies forward. Meanwhile the echelons of supply in the rear are acting in the same manner. One does not find in the drill-book that the way to keep coffee and slum hot after it has left the rolling kitchens is to take out the boilers with the food in them, wrap these boilers in old blankets, put them on the two-wheeled machine-gun carts, which can go nearly anywhere, and work forward to the troops in this way. This is just one instance, one trick of the trade. It is something that only training and experience can supply, and yet it is of most vital importance. I have known divisions to help feed the more recently arrived divisions on their right and left, when all have had the same facilities to start with. I have known new troops, fighting by an older division, to be forty hours without food when the men of the older division had been eating every day.