ruction, 50 carloads of building material were daily unloaded, and
for several weeks an average of 500,000 board feet of lumber set up
daily. The entire construction of the camp demanded 50,000,000 feet of
lumber, 700 tons of nails, 4,000,000 feet of roofing, and 3,000,000
square feet of wall board.]

Many apprehensions were fulfilled in fact, when the terrible winter
weather came, the worst in years. The northern camps faced it with
insufficient clothing. Pneumonia made its invasion. Artillerymen were
trained with wooden guns; infantrymen with wooden rifles or antiquated
Krags. But all the time the essential training proceeded and the calls
for replacements sent by General Pershing in France were met.

The first and vital need was for officers to train the willing but
inexperienced recruits. To meet this need a series of officers' training
camps had been established in the spring of 1917 and continued for a year.
Each camp lasted for three months, where during twelve hours a day the
candidates for commissions, chiefly college graduates and young business
men, were put through the most intensive drill and withering study. All
told, more than eighty thousand commissions were granted through the
camps, and the story of the battlefields proved at once the caliber of
these amateur officers and the effectiveness of their training. Special
camps, such as the school of fire at Fort Sill, carried the officers a
step further, and when they went overseas they received in schools in
France instruction in the latest experience of the Allied armies. The
colleges of the country were also formed into training schools and
ultimately about 170,000 young men, under military age, in five hundred
institutions of learning, joined the Students' Army Training Corps.

In all the army schools French and British officers cooeperated as
instructors and gave the value of their three years' experience on the
fighting front. But the traditions of the American regular army,
formulated in the Indian and frontier fights, rather than the siege
methods of the trenches, formed the basic principles of the instruction;
General Pershing was insistent that an offensive spirit must be instilled
into the new troops, a policy which received the enthusiastic endorsement
of the President. The development of "a self-reliant infantry by thorough
drill in the use of a rifle and in the tactics of open warfare" was always
uppermost in the mind of the commander of the