The chief function of the Quartermaster Corps might be described, I suppose, as spending. It was, in fact, barring the Ordnance Department, the greatest spending agency in America, if not in the world, during the war. Not many persons are aware, however, I imagine, that it has a division whose sole purpose is saving. I refer to the Salvage Division. This was the only organization in the army which turned waste into profit. It was a ragpicker, a garbage-collector, a junk-dealer, and an ole-clothes man combined. While certain departments of the government seized on the great emergency to spend money like a drunken sailor, as the politicians put it, the Salvage Service was as systematic a saver as the late Russell Sage. And, like that famous financier, it was able to show something for its savings—to be exact, something over $100,000,000. It had a perfect passion for economy. It saved everything, from the pieces clipped from a soldier’s overcoat when it was shortened to the food which he left on his plate. Nothing was too large or too small to escape it. Indeed, the members of the Salvage Service should have adopted for their shoulder-badge a design showing an ever-open eye. If a locomotive was utterly demolished in a railway wreck the men of the Salvage Service appeared on the scene almost before the wheels had stopped turning and collected the splintered remnants. If a soldier tossed a pair of worn-out socks into the garbage-barrel, the Salvage Service fished them out and used them for something or other. In France it saved and sorted the millions of sand-bags which lined the parapets of the trenches; it untangled and rerolled for future use the millions of feet of twisted, rusted barbed wire which formed the entanglements in front of the trenches; it gathered and sorted and sent back for reloading the empty shells from the field-guns; it fumigated and cleaned and pressed the soldiers’ uniforms; it washed their shirts and socks and underwear; it mended their shoes; it transformed their obsolete campaign hats into felt slippers, and both in this country and abroad it collected the waste from the mess-tables as well as introducing various methods of food-saving; it operated hundreds of camp and mobile laundries, where for a dollar a month a soldier could have washed all the clothing he wished; it ran farms and truck-gardens at the camps and cantonments in order to supply the troops with fresh vegetables; it maintained printing-shops, wagon-repair shops, carpentry-shops, and paint-shops, and just as the Treasury Department appealed to the country to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” so the Salvage Service, by means of posters and placards, appealed to the army to “Save! Save! Save!”