In those casual, comfortable, easy-going days before the Great War startled us out of our national complacency, when the work of the army consisted in garrisoning many small and widely scattered posts and in doing police duty on the Canal Zone or in “the Islands,” the Quartermaster Corps, the “Q. M.,” as it was familiarly called, occupied much the same relation to our little military establishment that a “general store” does to a village. By this I mean that it supplied most of the army’s wants. It was charged, to put it briefly, with clothing, feeding, housing, and paying the army, supplying it with horses, harness, vehicles, and, in short, virtually everything else save only the actual tools of war. It also manned and operated the steamers of the Army Transport Service, was charged with the movement of troops on land, and had jurisdiction to a large extent over motor transportation, especially the movement of supplies. Though its business methods were as antiquated as the quill pen and the copying-press, like the mules which drew its wagons it jogged unconcernedly along. If the colonel’s wife needed some shelves in her kitchen she sent for the quartermaster and they were put up with neatness and despatch. When the junior officers at a post wanted to attend a dance in town the quartermaster could always be depended upon to provide a conveyance. The quartermaster ran the post exchanges and canteens. If there was a delay in the delivery of the winter’s coal, if the bread was poorly baked, if the milk was sour, if the men’s shoes did not fit, if there was a leak in a barracks roof, if a horse developed a spavin, if the pay-checks were not received on time, it was the quartermaster who had to take the blame. He was all things to all men, and if he did not do all things as well as they might have been done, it was not his fault so much as the fault of the antiquated and cumbersome system in which he had been trained.