Spreading over almost the whole of France is a veritable network of navigable rivers and canals, of which the Engineers availed themselves to the utmost in the transportation of material and supplies. Transportation by the inland waterways was in charge of the 57th Engineers, this regiment being largely recruited from men who had had experience on the canals and rivers of the United States. In the days to come many are the tales that will be told by skippers of stern-wheelers on the Mississippi and captains on the Erie Canal of the days when they and their huskies of the Inland Waterways battalions moved the supplies for Pershing’s men up the Seine and through the canals of the Marne and the Rhône. To the dredging, dock construction, and stevedore regiments was assigned the gigantic task of dredging the channels and harbors of the seaports which the French placed at our disposal, of building wharves and berths for the reception of American ships, and of the transferring of the cargoes from ship to shore. The magnitude of their task is shown by the fact that cargo shipments grew from 20,000 tons in July, 1917, to 1,000,000 tons in November of the following year, while the 23 ship-berths which the French Government originally assigned to us had nearly quadrupled when the Armistice was signed. * * * * * Unless you have marched with armies or trekked across hot and arid lands, you cannot know what it is to be thirsty—really thirsty, I mean; so thirsty that your tongue swells until it all but chokes you or lolls from your mouth like that of a panting dog. Water is infinitely more important to the success of a military operation than arms or ammunition; to a certain extent it is more important than food; for, though troops can fight for an amazingly long time on short rations, or even on no rations at all, they cannot fight without water. The vital importance of providing an adequate water-supply was learned by the French in Algeria and Morocco, by the British in India and the Sudan, where the deserts were strewn for miles with the bodies of soldiers who had died from thirst. In the Cuban campaign our armies had far more deaths from impure water than from Spanish bullets. During the Italian offensive on the Carso, that terrible plateau of sun-scorched rock which lies beyond the Isonzo, hundreds of men, Italians and Austrians alike, died from thirst, the Austrians being eventually compelled to retreat because the Italian artillery had destroyed the pipe-lines which supplied them with water. During the fighting on the Western Front during the last summer of the war, when the semitropic sun of eastern France beat down on the heavy-laden backs of the panting, sweating men, when millions of feet and hoofs ground the roads to powder and filled eyes, ears, throats, and nostrils with the yellow, choking dust, when the air reeked with the mingled stenches of leather, gasoline, sweating horse-flesh, and human