To strike across the spider's web! That was the solution of the problem. Never mind if most of those cross-country connecting lines running at every conceivable angle to the main spoke lines and in turn bisecting the greater part of them, were for the most part single-tracked. Never mind if, as they began to climb the hills of Eastern France which held the eastern portions of the battle front--sectors assigned quite largely to the Americans--they attained one per cent grade or better. In the valley of the Loire where a good part of our military rail route would be located there is the easiest and steadiest long-distance grade in all France. With American ingenuity and American labor it would be comparatively easy to double track the single-track lines and in some cases even to lower the gradients, while, for that matter, the ingenuity of American locomotive builders might rise quite easily to the problem of producing an effective locomotive to overcome these one per cent pulls. I have spoken of the valley of the Loire because almost from the beginning it was chosen as the location of the chief main routes of the United States Military Railroad in France. Necessity dictated that location. It was both logical and efficient that the British should be given the great Channel ports for their supply service of men and munitions. Their endeavors so crowded Havre and Boulogne and Dieppe and Calais and Cherbourg, to say nothing of the rail lines which serve these ancient ports of the north of France, that they were out of the question for any large movement of American forces, although, as we shall see in good time, much Red Cross material, particularly in the early stages of our participation in the war, did come through Havre. The more distinctly American ports, however, were Brest, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, as well as the rapidly created emergency port at Bassens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. All of these harbors are on the west coast of France and give more or less directly in the Atlantic Ocean itself. With the possible exception of Bordeaux, in recent years they have been rather sadly neglected ports. That no longer can be said, however, for within a space of time to be measured by weeks and months rather than by years, they have become worthy of rank with the most efficient harbors of the world. It was necessity that made them so--the supreme necessity of the greatest war in history. So does the black cloud of war sometimes have its silver lining of permanent achievement.