Our cargo was now flowing into every one of the ports of France south of Cherbourg, and overflowing into Marseilles in the Mediterranean too. The less that had to go to Marseilles, the more shipping time would be saved from the longer trip through the Strait of Gibraltar. We Americans like competition. The different Atlantic ports were started on a "race to Berlin" unloading contest; the stevedores of the port which won would be the first to go home. No Americans in France were more homesick than our colored men. When one was asked whether he would rather work at Bordeaux than at Saint-Nazaire, he replied: "Is Bordeaux any nearer home?" The "rustling" of cargo now became a game in which joyous calls were heard in common urging against any shirking which might delay the return of the workers to the levees and the cotton fields of their own southland. In tune with the Herculean mechanical effort of the giant American cranes, their Herculean muscular effort in its impetuosity was in imminent danger of removing the stanchions from the ships as well as the cargo. A British skipper who thought that he would be two days in unloading, and found that only one day was required, returned home to say that he was lucky to escape without having his ship's plates torn off and started toward the front. When bags of sugar were piled so high on one dock that several tons went through the floor into the water, it was a tragedy to people on sugar rations at home and to the sugar-hungry men at the front, but in the fever of effort to win the war by supplying two million men with their requirements for battle it was only an incident of the wicked extravagance of war, which led one of the stevedores to say that the sugar must count in the record as cargo discharged, while he did not think that it would make that old sea that had made him seasick so much sweeter that you would notice it. The impetus which the coming of Harbord gave to the S. O. S. implies no criticism of past accomplishment. His business was to "go through," as it had been at Belleau Wood and in the counter-offensive. An unfinished plant, preparing for an offensive in the spring of 1919, must be made equal to one in the fall of 1918. There had never been any lack of energy in the S. O. S. This was guaranteed by our national character, under the whip of war. All the while we had been making progress. The feeling of helplessness on the part of the workers had been due to ambition thwarted in gaining the full results of the supreme efforts which they were eager to exert. There had been no cessation of building; no cessation in striving to find in Europe every available article which would save transport, without reference to the cost--cost being the one thing that never made us hesitate. Every man accepted the idea that all the money in the world was ours.