The Sentinel=record., 1918-01-29
WORK OF WAR DEPARTMENT
 IS TOLD BY SECRETARY BAKER Senate Committee Amazed When Made Aare of the Facs

was to be and where it was to be waeed
 'it was nOt a thing for Us to de. eide where our theatre of war should be The theatre of war was France IL Was not for Us to decide our line Of communications. Our line of com munications was across three thou sand miles of ocean, one end of if in Tested with submarines. It was not Tor Us to decide whether We would have the maneuvering of large bodies of troops in the open. There lay the antagonists on opposite sides of No Mans Land in the trenches at a death srapple with one another. Our an- tagonist was on the other side of that line and our problem was and is to get over there and get him.
 It was not the problem of doing it our way and letting everybody take care of himself. In the first place we were going to fight in France. not on our own soil and not on our ad- versary's soil and therefore at the very beginning it was obvious that the thing we had to do was not to man out an ideal plan of action. not 10 have the war college with its specu- laiye studies of Napoleon and every body else, map out the theoretically best way to get at some other coun- try; but it was the problem of study ing the then existing situation and bringing the financial, the industrial and the military strength of the United States into cooperation with the Great Britain and France in the most effective way The problem could not be decided here fancy in this audience there are men who have been in the trenches. The alto eether unprecedented character of that problem is the thing which every returning visitor tells us cannot be described iE words, cannot be put down in reports 1t is thing so dif- ferent from anything ese that ever went on in the world, SO vast in its desolation, so extraordinary in its uniqueness that il must be seen and studied on the ground in order to be comprehended at all.
 "lt IS easily imaained that we might have perfected an army over here and carried it across the ocean and found it wholly unadapted 10 it's task, and it might well have been that the army that we sent over was inst one thing that they did not need. and that the sole other thing which we might have supplied would nave been the thing essential to their success.
 50 that from the very beginning it was not a question of abstract speculation here, but question of study there to find out where our shoulder to the wheel could be put
 We realized that. And so Grea. Britain sent over 10 Us Mr. Balfou, and general brieades and a staff of experts. They came over here and you saw Mir Balfour in the house of congress and at the white house and in public meetings at one place and another, but the group of experts whom they brought over with them you did not see much of and vet they distributed themselves through the war department and their ordnance experts sat down with General Cro- zier; their supply experts with Gen eral Sharpe and his assistants: their strategists sat down with the army war college and all over this city there were these confidential groups exchanging information. telling how the thing was over there, what we could do, what they, advised us to do: what experience they had had in de- velopine this, that and the other i'm plement or supply; how certain plans which one might naturally have evolved out of the past experience of the world had been tried there and found not to work at all. They were exchanging information, giving us all that they thought was helpful. And then came Joffre with his wonderful reputation and his great charming personality, and he made a great fig ure here and we welcomed him. It was a tremendous inspiration to see the hero of the Marne; but with him came this lnobseryed staff of fifteen or twenty five young men, the most brilliant men in the French army strategetists mechanical experts, eX- perts in arms, experts in supplies. eX- perts in industry and manufacture and they told us not merely the for mai and military problems, but they brought over with them men who were in from the beginningl in their reoraanizations of their Industries their mobilization of their hdustria plants and we sat down wittf them in little groups until finally wN collated and collected and extracted all tho information which they eou q give us from their respective courties. And