Excerpt from The Building of an Army: A Detailed Account of Legislation, Administration and Opinion in the United States, 1915-1920

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of the building of an army; to describe the process by which the United States, with a regular military force of but one hundred thousand men on April 1, 1917, succeeded by November 11, 1918, in placing more than three million men under arms. More accurately, it is to tell only a part of that story; for in a broad sense an account of the building of an army under modern conditions of organized national warfare would call for an account of every side of the life of the nation at war. To describe how the army was provided with munitions and equipment would lead into a description of the war-time organization of the nation's whole industrial activity; to describe how it was fed would raise a discussion of the war-time dislocation of agriculture and commerce; an account of transportation and shipping arrangements would be essential; all sides of national effort would have to be touched on, because during the war all converged and focused on the combat-point of the army. None of these matters is within the scope of this book. The story which will be told is simpler. It is the story of the procuring and assembling of the human material out of which the army was built, and of its fashioning into an organized instrument of warfare. In a sense it will be also a story of organization, but not the whole story.

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