If this gift was so significant in spirit, it was also bravely helpful in round numbers. At the end of March, 1918, General Pershing had 366,142 soldiers in his command in France, and of these, after nine months of training and adjustment, he could put about 100,000 in the line. And within three months after this time he had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in France, the Navy Department having accomplished the astounding feat of transporting 637,929 in April, May, and June. The month that the reinforcement of the French and British Armies was planned and accepted the transport figures jumped from forty-eight thousand odd to eighty-three thousand odd. The month of its first practical operation the figures jumped again to one hundred and seventeen thousand odd, and in the month of June, the month of the anniversary of the first debarkation, there was a transportation of 276,372 men. The last few days of March, 1918, saw the first large troop movements from the American zone--that is, saw them strictly in the mind's eye. Actually, the rain came down in such drenching downpours that the French villagers whom the motor-trucks passed did not so much see as hear the doughboys. Throughout the whole zone the activity was prodigious. Along the muddy roads two great processions of motor-trucks crossed each other day and night, the one taking the soldiers to one front, the other to another. Sometimes the camions slithered in the mud till they came to a stop in the gutter. Then the boisterous, jubilant soldiers would tumble out and set their shoulders under wheels and mud-guards, and hoist the car into the road again. The singing was incessant. The mood of the songs swung from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night." The exuberance of the soldiers knew no bounds. They were about to answer "present" to the roll-call of the big guns, the call they had been hearing for so many months, that had seemed to them so persistently and personally compelling. They were going to become a part of that living wall which for three years and a half had held the enemy out of Paris. Those who were going to the British front were particularly exultant because they expected to find open fighting there, the kind they called "our specialty." To all the units going into the French and British Armies a general order was read, jacking up discipline to the topmost notch. "The character of the service this command is now about to undertake," read the order, "demands the enforcement of stricter discipline and the maintenance of higher standards of efficiency than any heretofore required. "In future the troops of this command will be held at all times to the strictest observance of that rigid discipline in camp and on the march which is essential to their maximum efficiency on the day of battle."