All this vast and varied achievement in France, of which it is possible to mention here only illustrative parts of a mere outline, was made possible by the big, closely knit and smoothly working organization of the two branches of the A. E. F., the Army and its Service of Supply. At the head of it all, organizer and administrator as well as soldier and general, was General Pershing, Commander in Chief. Under him the five great divisions of General Head Quarters,--the section that saw to it that all the needed elements of warfare, men, munitions, supplies, and materials for construction, were landed in France; the section that received and distributed all these elements; the section that trained the personnel of every sort; the sections that operated the troops and secured information concerning the enemy and safe-guarded that concerning our own affairs,--carried on each its own work in a great, widely ramifying organization, systematized and highly organized down to its last detail. Running all these organizations on business principles, in addition to the army officers who directed the phases dealing with combat, were successful business and professional men from private life in the United States who gave up big salaries and important positions to work for their country in France on the pay of an army officer. Among them and spending twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours out of the twenty-four on the job of speeding each his own particular work to success were engineers of international renown who had put through mighty projects of bridging and damming rivers, building railroads and tunneling the earth, experts in financial law, in mechanics, in construction, in finance, manufacturers of automobiles, leaders in steel industries, organizers of big business, officials of important railway companies. CHAPTER VIII AT THE FRONT When Americans endeavor to estimate the value of their work on the lines of battle they are bound to see and should be glad in justice to admit that our actual fighting effort was small indeed compared with the vast and bloody and appalling struggles in which our war associates had almost exhausted themselves. They are bound to see that its importance in the final decision was incommensurate with the amount of what they actually did on the fighting lines, although not, perhaps, with the extent of the nation’s preparation. It fell to America to add the deciding strength after years of battle in which the combatants had been so nearly equal that their armies on the Western front had swayed back and forth over a zone only a few miles in width.