The non-military person does not ordinarily associate with war such prosaic occupations as lumbering, quarrying, and highway building. They seem, at least at first thought, to be in character essentially industrial. But it must be remembered that the workman played fully as great a part as the soldier in winning the Great War. In fact, the combat troops could not have held the line for a day had it not been for the labor battalions, which, without incentive or excitement, glory or reward, and in most cases without public appreciation, toiled so faithfully and unceasingly to build the wharves, to unload the ships, to lay the railways, to construct the roads, and to hurry forward, in an unending stream, the food for the men and the food for the guns. It is quite understandable, once you stop to think about it, that in order to maintain our great armies in the field, there were required immense quantities of lumber for building wharves, barracks, storehouses, hangars, and hospitals, and enormous amounts of stone, crushed rock, and gravel for metalling the roads, ballasting the railways, buttressing the bridges, and making concrete for the fortifications. When we entered the war the supply of lumber was not nearly equal to the demands of the Allied Armies, to say nothing of our own. And, though there was, of course, plenty of rock and gravel in this country, we could not spare the tonnage to ship it overseas, even had such a course been practicable. (Perhaps it has never occurred to you how vitally important an item gravel is in military operations. Yet at one time the Germans threatened the Dutch with war if the latter persisted in their refusal to permit German gravel to be shipped across Holland for the construction of concrete fortifications in Belgium.) In view of these conditions, it devolved upon the Engineers to organize and equip special forestry, quarry, and highway regiments, as well as numerous labor battalions, and hurry them overseas with orders to obtain the urgently needed materials from the forests and quarries of France.