Now, though the non-military person may not have realized it, an exceedingly important factor in the successful conduct of operations is an adequate supply of up-to-date geographical monographs and handbooks, describing in completest detail the regions where the operations are taking place. Imagine, for example, how much difficulty you would experience and how little information you would obtain if you were to visit the galleries of the Vatican, the museums of Florence, or the churches of Venice without a guide-book. As few of the statues and pictures are labelled, you could only hazard a guess as to what you were seeing; you would not know where to go next or how to get there. The same thing holds almost equally true of armies. Land an expeditionary force in Patagonia, let us say, and imagine how helpless it would be if it had no accurate and detailed information as to the topography of the country, the size and locations of the towns and villages, the nature of the crops, and the customs of the natives. To fill this urgent need there was created the Military Monograph Subsection. The gradual evolution in the methods of this subsection may be summed up by saying that stiff official letters, the very tone of which was about as reassuring to the recipient as a court summons, have given place to informal, friendly communications which immediately create a bond of personal sympathy between the Intelligence Division and the person from whom information is desired; the questionnaires sent out by the subsection to those believed to have special knowledge of certain regions have dwindled from ponderous and forbidding volumes, the mere labor involved in answering which was appalling, to single pages of easily comprehended questions; and sets of stereotyped queries have, wherever possible, been replaced by intimate personal interviews. In other words, letters which addressed the recipient as “Sir” were so humanized that, when the war ended, they frequently began “Dear Bill.”