The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1918-02-01
Army in France Will
Soon Number 500, 900
Million More Ready
CRITICS MUCH I'M
PRESSED BY SPEECH
Secretary Of War, in Answering
Chamber!ain's Charges That Gov
ernment Had Broken Down in
1t. Preparations for War,
Makes Encouraging State
ment.
Plan of tho War.

Plan of the War.
Now, gentlemen, about the plan of
the war. 1t will be remembered that
this war broke out in August, 1914.
We went into it 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. 1t was
not as though war had broken out
between the United States and some
country, each of them p-ior 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 con-
Quoting war against its adversary,
but we were coming into war
which had been going on for two and
one-half years, in which the greatest
military experts, ell the inventive
genius, all of the industrial capaci-
ty of those greatest countries in the
warld had for two and half years
been solving the problem of what
kind of war it was to be and where
it was to be waged.
Not Our Choice.
"It was not thing for us to de-
eide where our theater of war should
be. The theater of war was France
It was not for us to decide our line
Of communications. Our ! line Of
communication was across 5000
niles of ocean, one end of it infest-
ed with submarines. 1t was not for us
to decide whether we would have the
naneuvering of large bodies of
troops in the open. There lay the
antagonists on opposite sides of No
Mans Land in the trenches at g.
death grapple with one another. Our
antagonist was on the other side of
that line and our problem was and is
to get over there and get at him.
Unprecedented Problem.
ssIt was not the problem of doing
it our way and letting everybody
else take care of himself. In the
first place we were going to fight in
France, not on our own soil and not
on our adversary's soil, and there
fore, 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 its speculative studies
of Napoleon and everybody else map
out the theoretically best way to get
at some other country, but it was
the problem of studying the then
existing situation and bringing the
financial, the industrial and the mil
itary strength of the United States
into cooperation with that of Great
Britain and France in the most i'm
mediate and effective way. That
problem could not be decided here.
I fancy in this audience there are
men who have been in the trenches.
The altogether unprecedented char
acter of that problem is the thing
which every returning visitor tells us
cannot be~described in words, cam
not be put down in. reports; it is a
thing so different from anything else
that ever went on in the world, so
vast in its desolation, so extraordi-
nary in its uniqueness that it must
be seen and studied on the ground
in order to be comprehended at all.
Easily Imagined.
'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
its task, and it might well have been