But although the Division had no large quantity of building supplies to sell, it was charged, after the armistice, with the duty of disposing of the facilities at the 182 construction projects which were terminated. Many of these projects were large ones, those in this category being for the most part training camps for troops. There was a camp shortage in 1918, and the Construction Division was doing everything in its power to overcome it. We were sending men overseas at the rate of 300,000 a month; and, since it was desirable to give every overseas soldier at least six months’ training, that implied camp accommodations for 1,800,000 men in the United States. The actual accommodations provided were for less than 1,370,000 troops. In 1918, after the augmented rate of embarkation became a fact, new training camp projects were consequently inaugurated at frequent intervals. Only a few days before the armistice the Construction Division began the construction of an enormous new camp which was to specialize in the training of infantry. All the national guard camps (sixteen of them) and most of the special-purpose camps, whether completely built or not, were condemned after the armistice for salvage. Most of these were veritable cities, some of them large enough to accommodate 40,000 men each, comfortably--with the adverb accented, for the comfort was based on such substantial (and costly) installations as water and sanitation systems, electric lighting, pavements, sidewalks, and even stores, theatres, and gymnasiums. It was the task of the Construction Division to dispose of these cities to such members of the public as cared to buy. A city, however, is something more than an accumulation of buildings and other tangible facilities. Quite as much as upon foundations of rock, a city rests upon logic--the logic of its location. Naturally the Government built its camps upon cheap land, therefore upon land not in demand by the population, therefore upon land not so located as to make it a logical place for a city. And so, although it was thought at first that perhaps some of these camps might prove to be the nuclei of permanent civilian communities, that notion soon had to be abandoned for the reason that few civilian movements arose to occupy permanently the former war buildings. An attempt was made, and still is being made, to use the former Nitro Powder Plant as a permanent civilian industrial city, and one or two training camps in the South have been held together by their purchasers with the idea of establishing communities on their sites. The others, however, in which the Government had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold out to the wreckers, who bought them for the sake of salvaging the building materials.