Hospitals were built upon a standardized system that could expand the number of available beds by from one thousand to five thousand in one day. When the armistice was signed there were in operation 219 base and camp hospitals and twelve convalescent camps and the hospital service was ready to provide a total of 284,000 beds. One of these hospital centers, the huge institution at Beaune, afterwards utilized by the “Khaki University,” was constructed in a few months, its 600 buildings of a permanent type including the necessary operating rooms, laboratories, administration buildings, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, and buildings for patients for a series of ten hospitals, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of surgeons, physicians, nurses and men. For the building of this hospital center railways were run to the site and concrete mixers set up to provide the material, and work was kept going at high speed day and night until it was ready to receive patients. Hundreds of construction projects were constantly under way for the housing, care, training and welfare of the army whose numbers were growing by tens of thousands every week and would in a few months more have amounted to four million men. There were receiving camps of tents and wooden barracks and dining halls and welfare structures, each of which had its water works and electric lighting and sewage disposal plants, for the debarking men; training camps; schools for the instruction of cooks, chauffeurs, Salvage Corps workers, Tank Corps men, candidates for the Engineering Corps, cavalry officers, coffee roasters, statistical officers, trench artillerymen, and for scores of other specialties in fighting and in caring for the fighting men, by intensive work through long hours every day; nearly a hundred factories in which were made candy, chocolate, crackers, hard bread and macaroni and coffee was roasted and ground, by which much tonnage was saved per month and costs were reduced; huge salvage and repair work; big laundry and sterilizing plants in one of which more than half a million pieces were washed or sterilized per week; motor truck depots and reconstruction parks--one of these latter transformed in two months from a thousand acres of farm land into a great motor plant with shops of steel and concrete covering 125,000 square feet, railways and switches, storehouses and offices; and dozens of other structures and developments in which great buildings had either to be erected or leased and adapted to new purposes.