At last after fifteen months his plans had achieved fruition. If he had not had imagination, he could not have visualized the structure before he began its building. Out of his window in that little room of the town hall, which had a significance that none of his other headquarters had, as he turned from his map he looked down upon the "sacred road" to Verdun, which was the main street of Souilly. Motor trucks came and went, and at one side of the town hall the staff cars stood in military line, waiting upon the commands of generals and colonels whom they served. The houses of the little town had not room for all the office force of First Army Headquarters. This had overflowed into many temporary buildings with walls of tar-paper, where all the different branches, to the tune of the hosts of typewriters which was the "jazz" of staff command, worked and had their messes. They sent out the leading, if not always, perhaps, the light, through the battle area, where the trucks surged all night and all day on the roads, going forward laden with ammunition and food and returning empty, where the ambulances went forward empty and returned laden, behind the vortex of the struggle. How was all this power, and how were the men who exerted it on a twenty-mile front in France, brought from home? Long before Marshal Foch had summoned our troops to the attack in the Meuse-Argonne, General Pershing had made his plan of how they should be concentrated as the right flank of an Allied movement. To carry this out he was to depend upon another adjutant. XXII A CALL FOR HARBORD Pershing's right-hand man--From the center of power to the field--Radical measures for the Services of Supply--Our own Goethals--Varied personnel united in discontent--Regulars and experts--Harbord's two problems of construction and morale. As President, Theodore Roosevelt had made Pershing a brigadier over the heads of a small host of senior officers, and had likewise singled out Sims, who was to command in European waters. When he was forming his division, which destiny was not to allow him to lead in France, he chose for one of his brigade commanders James G. Harbord, then a major of regulars. Harbord was not a West Pointer; having begun his army career as a private, his rank was not high for his years when we entered the war. Had the competition of civil professions applied in the army, it is safe to say that he would have been a major-general already, and that some of the colonels who were his seniors would still have been lieutenants. It is only instruction that one receives at West Point or at any college; education is for the graduate to receive in after life, a detail he sometimes neglects. Harbord educated himself by study and observation in the leisure hours which army officers have for the purpose.