More than five hundred service buildings were operated by these organizations in the various camps and cantonments in this country alone, and many hundreds more overseas. They furnished to the men wholesome club life, in comfortable houses, with music, games, lectures, reading and writing facilities and athletic equipment. The Young Women’s Christian Association built, furnished and officered at least one hostess house in every camp, wherein the women relatives and friends of the soldiers could meet them in homelike surroundings. The American Library Association installed in the camps specially designed buildings, manned them with trained workers and provided many thousands of volumes which were kept in constant circulation. The War Camp Community Service worked in the localities surrounding the camp, where it aided the citizens in efficient expression of their universal spirit of hospitality and friendliness toward the troops, maintained clubs for soldiers on leave, provided information bureaus, recreation and entertainment, and, in general, helped to create and preserve between the men in training and the community in which they were located a normal and helpful social relationship. So, in a year and a half, America expanded her army of 212,000 into an army of 2,000,000 men overseas, a million and a half in training, and two million more preparing, as these latter were sent across the ocean, to take their places in the cantonments. She turned this democratically chosen material from raw civilians of peace-loving traditions into gallant fighters and fused a heterogeneous mass of nationalities into a solid body inspired by and fighting for American ideals. It was an army so eager to get into the struggle for liberty and justice against militarism and autocracy and its spirit was so high and unanimous that every regiment leaving a cantonment for overseas service celebrated the coming of its orders with enthusiasm and was envied by all those not yet chosen. It was an army that, above everything else, was the expression of the mind, the heart and the soul of the American people. Almost every home in the nation had some part in it and it went upon its war adventure with the prayers, the blessings, the love and the ardent wish to serve its needs of the whole people. Never was an army sent to war so fathered and mothered, so big-sistered and big-brothered, so loved and cheered by an entire nation and provided for by its Government with such care and far-seeing vision as this that sailed from the ports of America for the battlefields of France. CHAPTER VII MAINTAINING THE ARMY IN FRANCE