Altogether there were built a score of these huge buildings for various war work purposes. If massed together they would have covered sixty acres. Speed and economy were the two essentials in their construction and each of them grew with startling rapidity. Three months was a long time for the erection of any one of them. Seven or eight or ten weeks was the more usual time to elapse from the moment work was begun until the building was ready for occupancy, equipped with steam heating, electric lighting and sprinkler systems, aero fire alarm signals or fire towers, and telephone systems comprising in each one from four hundred to a thousand instruments. Some of the buildings were two and some three stories high. Most of them were built of metal lath finished on the outside with stucco and on the inside with wall board, but in the enormous War and Navy buildings the materials were steel and concrete. [Illustration: VIEW FROM WASHINGTON MONUMENT, AUGUST, 1917] [Illustration: SAME VIEW ONE YEAR LATER, SHOWING WAR BUILDINGS CONSTRUCTED IN THE MEANTIME] Measuring approximately from four to six hundred feet by from two to four hundred, each of these great structures covered from three to five acres of ground space, while its floor space, if two stories high, was between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet, but from eight to fifteen acres if higher. Its long corridors, stretching out in separate wings in parallel lines from the front section, or “head house,” with rows of offices upon each side, if set end to end would have measured a mile, a mile and a half, three miles, in length. Office boys had to use roller skates up and down these hallways in order to economize time. Last and most enormous of these structures were the huge Army and Navy buildings, standing side by side, of steel and concrete, three stories high, containing forty-three acres of floor space and affording accommodations for 10,000 employees. The Navy Department building has a front section or “head house” 860 feet long with nine wings extending from it each 500 feet long and 60 feet wide, while the “head house” of the War Department building is 784 feet long and its eight wings of similar size. The contract for these two buildings was let at the end of February, 1918, and by the middle of the following August the occupants had begun to move in and six weeks later their offices were fully occupied. The cost of the entire building program for the housing of war activities at the capital was $15,000,000.