The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-01-29

ne at least naQ redllzeu the time E uH-
 making required. But even France her self, with the enemy at her throat he added. had not been able to see what vest gun programmes the war would lead into.
 During his general statement of the war plan and how it was developed, Mr. Baker was rarely interrupted. He said:
 WAR PLANS
 Now, gentlemen, about the plan of the war. It will be remembered that this war broke out in August, 1914. We went ir to 1t in April, 1917. so that for two and one-half years, or more than two and one-half years the war had been going on. u was not as though war had broken out between the United States and some country. each of them. prior to that time, having been at peace with one another and with everybody else; so that an immediate plan should be made in the United States for conducting war against it's adversary, but we were com ing into war which had been going on for two and one-half years. in which the greatest military experts. all the inven- tive genius all of the industrial capacity
 or those greatest countries in the world
 had for two and one-half years been solv-
 ing the problem of what kind of a war lt WAS u Dt dilu WHeTe II was JO Dc
 waged.
 NO DECISION
 Tt was not a thing for us to decide
 where our theatre of war should be. The theatre of war was France It was not
 for us to decide our line of communica- tions Our line of communications was across 900 miles of ocean, one end of it infested with submarines It was not for 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 death grapple with one an other. Our antagonist was on the other side of that line and our problem was,
 and is. to get over there and get him PROBLEM OF DOING IT NOW Tt was the problem of doing it our way and letting everybody else take care of himself Tn the first place, we were gcing to fight in France. not on our own soil, and not on our adversary's soil, and, therefore, at the very beginning it was obvious that the thing we had to do was not to map out an ideal plan of campaign not to have the war college with it's speculative studies of Napoleon ana everybody else map out the theoreti- cally best way to get at some other
 country, but it was the problem of studying of the then situation and bring ing the financial. the industrial and the military strength of the United States into cooperation with that of Great Britain and France in the most imme- diate and effective way That problem could not be decided here. I fancy in thi. audience there are men who have been in the trenches.
 The altogether unprecedented char aoter of that voblem is the thing which every returning visitor tells us cannot be described in words. cannot be put down in reports; 1t IS thing so different from anything else that ever went on in the
 world. so vast in it's desolation, so ex- tracrdinary in it's uniqueness that it
 must be seen and studsed on the ground in order to be comprehended at all .It is easily imagined that we might have perfected an army over here and carried it across the ocean and found it
 wholly unadapted to it's task. and 1t
 tContirued on Page TAree)