Whether it was the officers drawn from civil life without military training, or the laborers or the privates, every man in the Service of Supply wished that he were at the front. Hundreds of officers with combat training and thousands of soldiers who had been in the training camps found themselves, because of their particular efficiency in business organization, immured in some particular Service of Supply branch, doing long hours of prosaic work in the different camps and shops of the base ports and central France without hope, so far as they could see, of ever hearing a shot fired. It seemed to them frequently that the staff organization of the Service of Supply lacked the characteristics of energetic direction and team play with which they had been familiar in civil life. They had everything to make them discouraged. General Harbord, with the reputation he had won as a fighter, his magnetism, his understanding of human nature and his capability of promptly grasping the essentials of any problem, soon showed that he had the talent for transforming the spirit of the personnel by applying the indefatigable industry and the patriotic spirit of this vast force in a homogeneous corps, without which the victory of the American forces in France would not have been possible. While General Harbord was reorganizing the Service of Supply, General Pershing was preparing in haste and under great handicaps for the direction of hundreds of thousands of men in battle. The division was the fighting unit of our army. It went into the trenches and into battle as a division; was transferred from one part of the line to the other as a unit which was complete in all its branches, with a personnel of twenty-seven thousand men, or about double the size of a British or French division. The command of many divisions in battle brought us to the question of higher tactics. We had to train officers for this high responsibility as well as for leading the battalions in the front line.