It appeared that we should have considerable tonnage available for such use--tonnage released by the armistice from other service. For one source, there was the Navy. Its battleships and cruisers variously had been protecting the coast, convoying transports, and holding themselves ready in the combined Grand Fleet to meet the expected German naval attack in force. These duties had come to an end. The Hines plan contemplated the temporary conversion of a number of war vessels into troop carriers by the installation of berths and messing accommodations. Although all foreign tonnage was to be withdrawn at once, the Transportation Service hoped to secure some additional capacity by chartering passenger vessels from foreign owners under new arrangements. The most promising source of new capacity, however, lay in the fleet of army cargo transports which, on the day of the armistice, represented about 2,500,000 deadweight tonnage[2] in the aggregate. The armistice immediately rendered a great part of this tonnage no longer necessary to the Government in the maintenance of a vast overseas supply service. The A. E. F. was thereafter to exist on a garrison basis, requiring only the ordinary garrison supplies of food and clothing. The great cargoes of ordnance and aircraft, of raw steel and semi-finished materials for the French and English munitions plants, of horses and mules, of railway and engineering supplies--the tonnage which had laden the cargo fleet in the past and had heaped up at the Atlantic terminals--were to cross the ocean no more. It was proposed to take the best of the cargo transports and convert them immediately into troopships. The War Department adopted the entire plan, and the first act of the Transportation Service was to begin a survey of the cargo fleet to determine what vessels were most suitable for conversion. Only the larger and faster boats would serve, and of course they had to be ships with holds adapted to the installation of troop quarters. Specialized vessels, such as tankers and ore carriers, would not do. For the Transportation Service the armistice was but an episode. It merely changed the character of its work and added to the volume of it. The peak of the operations curve, so far as troop transportation was concerned, was not reached until eight months after the armistice had been in effect. The thousands of troops in the Transportation Service yearned for discharge and home as ardently as did the rest of the Army; yet these men realized that it would be months before their work could end. Meanwhile they would have to see hundreds of thousands proceeding to demobilization camps as rapidly as steamships and trains could carry them, with never a thought of the transportation men who had made their early discharge possible.