By the following summer, a year after these things were happening, so enormous were the developments and improvements this country had made, that with 250,000 and sometimes even 300,000 soldiers per month pouring into the French ports, with all the vast amounts of food, equipment, clothing and munitions for their use that went in with them, and with all the huge and varied quantities of construction material also being landed, the port facilities were equal to all needs and docks, warehouses and unloading machinery were ready for the still greater demands upon them which would presently have followed if the war had not come to an end. A great part of the material for this development had to be shipped from the United States, as well as the tools with which the work was done. The piles for the building of the docks, the lumber for the barges on which to place the pile drivers, the material for long blocks of storehouses, the rails and cars and locomotives for the making and operating of hundreds of miles of track, lumber for the building of barracks for the thousands of workmen, dredges, cranes, steam shovels, tools and materials of every sort--almost all had to be shipped from the United States and unloaded at the small, congested French ports, which were being enlarged and developed all the time that this work of unloading was going on in the cramped and crowded space. In all, more than a dozen French ports were used by the American Government and in each one more or less expansion and development had to be done to make it serviceable, and in all the more important ones a very great amount of development work was instituted and carried through at breakneck speed. So much was done that through the last months of the war it would have been of little strategic value to the Germans if they could have gained possession of the Channel ports of France, for which they had striven mightily in order to cut off communications between England and the British armies in the field, for by that time there was room for them also at the more southerly ports. St. Nazaire was opened first and was followed by Bordeaux, Brest, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Rouen, Marans, Tonnay-Charente, Marseilles and others. [Illustration: ONE OF THE DOCKS IN A FRENCH PORT DEVELOPED BY THE UNITED STATES]