In our equipment we were helpless without our Allies. But in our manpower, we did surprisingly well. A little over a month after war was declared, we did the astonishing thing of passing a Draft Act. We put teeth in the law of 1792 promoted by George Washington, which had been a dead statute for over one hundred and twenty-five years. Instead of the horrors of volunteering, of utterly untrained men, of political shilly-shallying, we turned to a just and equalizing system. We did away with the woes of extra disease and death--and put our soldiers into training. Not in _this_ war would absolutely green officers send into eternity helpless volunteers. Our best men went to training camps, where they at least had to qualify in leading others. Not so bad. But of course these candidates couldn’t be fully trained in eighty days. And the regular officers, who had been deprived of modern methods in Europe, couldn’t give them all they needed. But they _did_ get many essentials, which they could pass on to the drafted men. Today, many don’t realize what a vast amount of hardship, sickness and death was saved by our moves of the draft and officers’ training camps. It has been estimated that by the draft alone we saved five per cent in money and possibly twenty per cent in human life. Not so bad. To be sure we had unnecessary suffering and mortality. No system invented as late as 1917 could have overcome our shiftlessness during the years before. A month after we declared war, General Pershing was sent to Europe with a handful. “Where are the Americans?” asked our Allies. “Why,” he had to explain, “they are back in the United States getting ready.” And for a year they had to keep getting ready before they were of real physical help.