Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill—Army Tracks and Traffic BILL BROWN, who once drove a Santa Fe "Mogul" across the Kansas Prairies, hitched up his grimy khaki overalls and looked out of the cab of his monster consolidation locomotive marked "U. S. A.," which had left its Philadelphia maker less than a month before and which now panted alongside a quay at St. Nazaire in France. A scene of incessant action unfolded before him. In the lock basin was a forest of funnels and masts of American ships whose gay camouflage gleamed in the sunlight. From one of them a ninety-ton naval gun swung ashore as easily as a bale of hay; from another, five-ton motor trucks were lowered as lightly. Cranes creaked; the plantation melodies of the Sunny South, sung by negro stevedores, mingled with the song of Chinese coolies who formed a continuous line of cargo carriers from deck to dock. In the yards nearby dozens of huge American engines, hauling endless chains of American cars, loaded with American supplies, snorted off to American depots, often on American tracks sentinelled by American poles down which flashed American messages sent and received by American men and women. Likewise for miles up and down the winding inlandwaterways American tugs, pulling American boats, chugged along bearing their burden of American freight and responsibility. Day and night and with an effort as ceaseless as the tide of tonnage that beats on those stricken shores of France, is the movement of American freight and transport over there. What was happening in the port that made Bill Brown blink his eye and breathe a little faster was happening in more than half a dozen ports along that same French coast with varying degrees of variety and volume but always with the same unending action. Again we are confronted by a miracle of expansion. In...