shoot elk or catch trout; they were going to a country 3,000 miles away for the purpose of killing Germans, and no one could say how long the business would take them. It was a Titanic task, this equipping of the men who took up arms against Germany. The organization which handled the buying end of it was roughly as follows: in Washington the Clothing and Equipage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase, where all the activities were centralized; in Philadelphia a purchasing office, which was a branch of the great Quartermaster Depot in that city, and in New York a procurement office which kept constantly in touch with the raw-material markets of the world. The innumerable special-service units which were constantly being added to the rapidly expanding army required all sorts of strange, new equipment and special clothing. The cooks and bakers had to have cotton aprons and the blacksmiths leather ones. The linemen of the telegraph battalions had to have special gloves. Hoods were needed for the motorcycle despatch-riders, overalls for the men of the stevedore battalions, helmets for the camp firemen, garments of fur and leather for the flying-men. The prisoners began to come streaming in and for them had to be designed clothing which would insure their speedy recognition and recapture in case they attempted to escape. The convalescents at the hospitals needed special suits. The expeditionary troops sent to Siberia and the Murman Coast required outfits which would keep them warm through the long arctic winters. And uniforms had to be provided for the army’s women nurses. Besides this vast quantity of clothing there were tents to be provided, cots, blankets, towels, shaving outfits, brown-canvas bags for filtering water, and the blue-denim bags in which the soldiers kept their personal belongings. These things were not in existence anywhere; they had to be made from the outset. To produce them in the enormous quantities required, not only took the maximum output of all the factories and mills already engaged in the manufacture of such articles, but hundreds of other plants had to change over their machinery in order to meet the army’s needs, and the Quartermaster Corps had to send experts to give instruction at these plants in the new manufacturing processes and methods. Nor was it enough for the Quartermaster Corps to thus become itself a manufacturer of clothing and equipment. It had to manufacture the cloth used in the clothing, and, going still further, it had to provide the raw cotton and wool used in making the cloth, as well as the hides for the leather used in the shoes. And it had to produce this staggering volume of equipment quickly, for the Germans would not wait. It was compelled, moreover, to make its purchases in a market glutted with orders from the Allied governments and from the domestic trade. And, to increase the difficulties under which the corps labored, it had to buy