The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-04-21
Glimpse Al the Work American
 Engineers Are Doing Ln France

on the accomplishment of the American army Its job is just beginning. The
 job their brothers of the pick and ham
 mer and shovel and riveter began a few months ago has become so extensive, so gigantic in plan and realization, that it is not the heat of patriotic fire but 1 the cold facts of steel and concrete and wood and stone which inform the as- ! tonished eye that the men of the rear are winning their half of the war. And yet the generals and the colonels and the captains who with a sweep of
 the hand and 6 nod of direction. order the making Of cities and the destruc- tion of villages in their way, and who 1 have seen hills torn down. and docks spring up and locomotives arrive which were ordered by mail, say merely, the work IS going on," as if to blanket the enthusiasm of the visitor
 And the boys fresh from home, young lads whose hearts still beat in the states,
 all those thousands who along with their officers want America to know what is going on in France, because they are proud of their work, realize that for tho present the facts must remain behind the
 curtain of military secrecy
 For several days have been visiting all the camps and works in this French port, and of the things which I have seen and of the operations the engineers are engaged upon, little can be told, for the greater they are the less must be said. This is a thundring city. It is an Amer ican city, roaring with work and with traffic, and inland for many miles in a line that leads eventually straight across the heart of France to it's battlefront. the Americans are at work
 Railroads, wharves. docks, terminals, 1r. ntix- hI1fl mo are under way. some are yet on blue print paper, and it is because the job is still unfinished, and will be for several months, that the men whose duty 1t is to build, characteristically frown upon enthusiastic reports and say wait until we are through, and have moved out of here to the front.''
 The work is "in progress they say, and just what part is completed cannot be told here, but perhaps this statement made by an officer will illustrate its mag nitude:
 If we were in America,~ he said,
 with all the facilities which America offers, sure supply, men. everything at the end of our fingers or telephone wire-we would require 5000 men for 200 days to do this york;
 Needless to say there are not 5o,00o men at this one port doing this one job, but on the other hand, records for time have been and are being made such as the United States never knew at home. But it will not be until the last of the large plans still on paper are realized, after months of still harder work, that the American en- gineers will share the enthusiasm and
 optimism of the civilian observer. CONCENTRATION OF SUPPLIES
 All energies are concentrated on pre-
 l. @..ta n. -r.,xr Tonnage. Army tonnage includes all most everything in the world of peace and war: "of shoes-and ships-and
 sealing wax-of cabbages and kings ' modernized into something like "of tanks and trains and tooth paste of chewing gum and guns"
 Provide for tonnage for 12,000.0 900 men-that is the problem of the en- gineers. Twelve million, because they figure that if the nation puts two mil- lion men into France, it will require exactly six times the amount of sup plies per man that would be required
 for civilians at home. The soldier eats more, he wears out more-and he shoots off millions of tons of steel and explosives. So if there are to be two
 million men in the army in France, they will need just as much in weight and bulk as all the inhabitants of New York city, Chicago. Philadelphia and Boston or Pittsburg-the food, equipment, houses, furniture and trav-
 cling accommodations of city or na-
 tion of 12,000,000 emn, and the en- gineers are preparing for the day when such an army will be here, and pre- pairing in such manner that there will be no delays, no breakdowns, no stoppage in that vast supply.
 At the port which can describe only in part, the work under way provides
 for only part of the army, and the
 rest will be cared for at and from
 many other ports, at each of which there are already improvements in har-
 bors, docks, wharves and terminals. In this one anonymous port the ware houses alone will hold several weeks reserve supply for the army.
 The colonel of certain regiment stationed here introduced me to a cap tain whose most famous work in the