Never before has an army been called upon to send subsistence so great a distance to so many men. It was obviously impossible to ask France and England to provide for our rapidly increasing armies from their own scanty stores, for those countries were already rationing their civilian populations. The food had, therefore, to be obtained in the United States, some of it being transported 6,000 miles before reaching the mess-tables of the A. E. F. Moreover, in order to provide against the possibility of the food-ships being torpedoed or the capture of the base depots, it was necessary to send two pounds of food where one would ordinarily have answered. To make things worse, as the demands for food increased, the available tonnage decreased. The utmost economy in space became so imperative, indeed, that inspectors from the Packing Service Branch were stationed at the various depots with instructions to pay particular attention to the thickness of lumber used in the packing-cases and to insist on the utilization of every cubic foot of spare space, as, for example, the boilers in rolling kitchens, which were filled with various articles of subsistence supplies. Even the marmites—the camp cooking-pots—were filled with beans, peas, and other dry stores. When, in the spring of 1918, the Germans launched that tremendous offensive which has been so fittingly called “the charge of a nation,” and every available ton of shipping was required for the transport of the troops which we were rushing overseas to stem the Teutonic onslaught, all canned fruits and vegetables—pears, apples, pineapple, peas, corn, asparagus, sweet potatoes—were stricken from the lists, such space as was available being filled with boneless beef, dried fruits, dehydrated vegetables—and tomatoes! I do not mean to imply that such mainstays as the “four B’s”—bread, bacon, beef, and beans—were sacrificed for the juicy fruit of the tomato-vine, for they were not, but tomatoes were regarded as such an important item of the soldier’s menu that, notwithstanding the poverty of space, their shipments, instead of being diminished, were increased. In addition to the customary ways of serving them, thousands of cans were taken up to the line to relieve the soldier’s thirst, a quart of tomato juice being more effective than a gallon of water. Lest you should get the impression, from what I have just said, that there was a shortage of beans, I might mention, in passing, that 75,000,000 cans of baked beans with tomato sauce were put in the hands of the army cooks, and in order to provide against any possible lack of this stand-by, there was purchased to supplement them 77,000,000 pounds of dried beans. I have never heard an American soldier complain that he did not have enough beans. Foreseeing the enormous demand which there would be for prunes and dried apricots and apples, the quartermaster-general summoned from his ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of California, where