For the fiber of this War Council the President scanned closely the professional and business ranks of American men. He reached out here and there and chose--here and there. And, in a similar way, the War Council chose its own immediate staff. A man from a New York city banking house would find his office or his desk--it was not every executive that could have an office to himself in those days--adjoining that of a ranch owner from Montana or Wyoming. The lawyer closed his brief case and the doctor placed his practice in other hands. The manufacturer bade his plant "good-by" and the big mining expert ceased for the moment to think of lodes and strata. A common cause--a common necessity--was binding them together. War! War was the cause and war the necessity. A real war it was, too--a real war of infinite possibilities and of very real dangers; war, the thing of alarms and of huge responsibilities, and for that war we must prepare. It was said that America was unready, and so it was--in a way. It was unprepared in material things--aëroplanes and guns and ships and well-trained men. But its resources in both money and in men who had potential possibilities of becoming the finest soldiers the world had ever seen, were vast, almost limitless. And it was prepared in idealism, and had assuredly a certain measure of ability. It was prepared too to use such ability as it had in turning its resources--money and untrained men--into a fighting army of material things; material things and idealism. One thing or the other helped win the conflict. * * * * * "They said that we could not raise an army; that if we did raise it, we could not transport it overseas; and that if we did transport it overseas, it could not fight--and in one day it wiped out the St. Mihiel salient." These words tell the entire story--almost. Not that it becomes us Americans to talk too much about our forces having won the war. For one thing, it is not true. The British and the French armies also won the war, and if both had not hung on so tenaciously ours would not even be a fair share of the victory. But for them there would have been no victory, not on our side of the Rhine, at any rate, and men in Berlin, instead of in Paris, would have been dictating peace terms.