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carriage for this mighty weapon, that lifts it above the parapet to hurl its mighty missile and racking charge a half score of miles to sea-to attempt to describe its intricacies would but confuse my own and the reader's mind. One of these carriages involves as many as 3,000 separate parts.

It is the officer of the Ordnance Department that must conceive, plan, design, manufacture, issue, and repair all this category of material which goes to make up the implements of an army. What must he know to perform these functions? What must be his training to guide with efficiency the labor of the 6,000 workmen in the six great establishments where the ordnance material of the army is made? . . .

In addition the material that is manufactured in the Government arsenals large quantities are purchased from private manufacturers. Procurement by manufacture requires expert knowledg of manufacturing processes, including machine operations, foundry work, forging, pattern making, leather working woodworking, pressed steel construction, plating, wheel construction, brass drawing, manufacture of powder and high explosives, grinding of lenses, assembling and testing optical instruments, forging and testing armor-piercing projectiles, etc. It further necessitates expert knowledge of power plants, fuels, oils, machinery, raw materials, and electrical installations. In short, it requires all of the expert knowledge necessary for the economical operation of large manufacturing plants, and the greater part of it pertaining to manufacture of the most exacting type. Chemical testing and research work for powders and higher explosives, as well as analyses and tests of oils, paints, etc., are carried on at the Picatinny Arsenal, and metallurgical, chemical and physical tests and research work are carried on at the Watertown Arsenal in connection with the manufacture of iron and steel, physical tests of material for commercial purposes, and microscopical and physical tests for the department. This class of employment requires very exact scientific attainments of the officers in charge.

SIGNAL CORPS.

Experimental work in general, tests of powder and material, are conducted at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground. For this employment intimate knowledge of interior and exterior ballistics, action of powder and explosives, anad manipulation of delicate electrical and other testing instruments are required.

The

One of the greatest advances made in the art of war during recent years has to do with the service of information. motorcycle, the swift automobile, the land military telegraph line, field telephone systems, field wireless telegraph outfits, and the aeroplane have revolutionized the system of communication and of obtaining information. The great service of information is specalized in by the Signal Corps, and the efficient handling of all the apparatus that pertains to this service can only be by highly trained and experienced individuals. In case of war a thousand patriots might rush forward for service in the aviation corps. By the time the war was over they might have obtained sufficient knowledge to make them useful.

ENGINEER CORPS.

The engineer is another essential military specialist. The swift building of a pontoon bridge over turbulent streams may be required to win a victory or save an army. Military engineering consists, broadly, of the application of engineering science for the accomplishment of military purposes. And military engineering, therefore, requires an extensive knowledge of military art and also of the art of the engineer. He builds all the harbor defenses. He must be an expert in field engineering in all its branches, including fortifications, the use of explosives, construction of bridges, roads and field railroads, reconnoissance and survey, including field astronomy, photography, and lithography. He must have knowledge of electrical and mechanical engineering, which is required in the operation of searchlights, electrical mines, lighting plants, and power machinery for carrying out all sorts of field work.

MEDICAL CORPS.

It is very natural for the query to arise in one's mind as to why any good doctor would not make an efficient medical officer of the army. There are many reasons. In the first place, the problem of administration in the Army Medical Corps presents features not dealt with in private practice. And the great field of military sanitation as applied in the military service by medical officers is a distinct specialty. It embraces the subjects taught in post-graduate courses in some of the most progressive medical schools under the caption of "Public Health and Preventive Medicine." It includes also those special measures which have been developed entirely within the military service for the care of troops in the field, where large bodies of men are brought together without the modern methods of waste disposal available in towns and cities. A few years ago it was considered impossible for troops to continue to camp on the same ground for a longer period than two weeks without camp diseases becoming epidemic. At the present time in the United States Army, even under unfavorable conditions of climate and terrain, troops remain on the same ground under canvas for indefinite periods, with a continuously low sick list. The special knowledge necessary to inaugurate and maintain these conditions is of the highest importance to the health of the army and to its battle efficiency. Again, the recruitment, instruction, and control of the Hospital Corps and the Army Nurse Corps is a aspecial field for the military surgeon.

The establishment of aid stations, dressing stations, hospitals, and other formations for the care of sick and wounded on the field of battle; the medical officer must understand where these formations should be established in order to obtain the best results, and at the same time not interfere with the movement of ammunition trains, reserves, or other bodies of troops necessary to battle success. To enable him to perform these duties successfully and to obtain a reasonable degree of protection from fire for his wounded, a medical officer must have knowledge of the range and trajectory of projectiles; he must be able

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to read a map and to estimate therefrom the places most protected from rifle fire, from artillery fire; the most direct lines of aid to the front and for the evacuation of wounded to the rear; the slopes that are prohibitory for wheeled vehicles, the places where watercourses may be forded, etc. In short, the Medical Corps of the army is the great conserving agency of a destructive organization. To wage war successfully, the greatest amount of destruction must be visited upon the armed forces of the enemy. For this end is required the utmost conservation of the health, energies, and life of the army. And to this great end the highly trained and specialized Medical Corps is absolutely essential.

QUARTERMASTER CORPS.

The capacity for organization and administration required of officers in the Quartermaster Corps of the army is at least equal to that required in the great supply departments of any of the combinations of capital and units of economic production in the world. Problems of paying, feeding, clothing, and transporting armies and their supplies are full of complexities and difficulties, the enumeration of which space does not permit. Nothing is more true than the oft-quoted and vigorous statement that an army marches on its belly. A single weak link in the chain of the supply system may lose a battle, and an uneducated and untrained quartermaster is as useless and defective as would be a novice in the control of the great power plants that have harnessed the falls of Niagara.

JUDGE ADVOCATE.

It may seem a strange statement that the army must have attorneys and counselors just as much as the United States Steel Corporation must have them. For instance, the present Judge Advocate General of the Army, upon the institution of American government in the Philippine Islands, completely organized the various departments of government on the civil side. Of his work, ex-President Taft, the President of the Philippine Commission, which succeeded the Military Governor as the governing authority in the Philippine Islands, said that "Colonel Crowder's activities were limited only by what would be the limitations of a cvil government and legislature." Under his administration there were prepared customs regulations, coast trade regulations, and the municipal law of the Philippine Islands, which intrusted the people of the province and municipalities with a great part of the management of their local affairs, thus preparing them for the exercise of self-government. He so amended the Sapanish code of criminal procedure by a military order as to make it conform to our common law and constitutional principles. This order still governs criminal procedure in the Philippine Islands. He reorganized the courts of the Philippine Islands and was an Associate Justice on the civil side of the Supreme Court for the first year after its reorganization. During the intervention by the United States in Cuba from 1906 to 1909, the present Judge Advocate General was Acting Secretary of State and Justice. He was legal adviser of the Provisional Governor, President of the Advisory Commission,

and in charge of the electoral administration. Laws regulating the registration of voters and the conduct of elections were framed.

In citing this individual record of service in the army's law department I do it to show what may be the career of an army Judge Advocate, and what is required to enable him worthily to meet the demands of such a career.

Let us now turn from the consideration of the great technical specialties that are so necessary to the efficiency of an army and consider why it is that the soldier who walks or rides and shoots and fights can lay claim to the respect that is due worthy members of a learned profession.

Why is it that any man who can tote a pack and carry a rifle cannot be transformed immediately into an effective infantryman? Why is it that one who adds to these capabilities some knowledge of horsemanship cannot in the twinkling of an eye, by the donning of a uniform, be a worthy cavalryman, or, with a little training in pointing a gun, be a pretty good artillerist? And in the higher fields of leadership, why can't any good American organizer, with sound judgment and courage, attain military success in larger operations?

INFANTRY.

Dashing cavalry may effect a brilliant raid in the rear of the enemy and in a hundred ways vindicate and justify its existence and necessity. Many a critical situation may be saved by the steadfastness and power of the field artillery. But the foundation of the army structure is the plodding, trudging, digging, sweating, burden-bearing infantryman. When the lay mind has been persuaded that the technical specialists cannot be improvised and that even the cavalryman and artillerymen must have some modicum of training before efficiency is attained, extremely persistent is the tendency still to think that the very foundation of an army can be summoned into being as if by magic. Many presentday Americans have no experience with horses. And the individual's conviction that one who is a horseman is therefore superior to himself in that particular line is what makes it fairly easy to convince the lay mind of the necessity of adequately trained cavalry. The same thing applies to the field artillery or any branch of the service that has to do with implements more or less mysterious to the ordinary individual through lack of his acquaintance therewith. But everybody knows he can walk and carry a pack on his back at least a little ways and point a rifle and pull a trigger. And thus there seems to have been in the minds of our people, from the first until the present, an abiding illusion that an infantryman can be improvised. But he can't.

A very simple thing it seems to care for one's feet. But as a matter of fact, the care of the feet in marching is an art in itself and if unlearned the ignorance of it will destroy a command. And marching. An improvised army would be marched to death by trained troops before any physical con

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tact need be gained. In manoeuvring for position untrained and unhardened troops would wilt and drop by the waayside in exhaustion, while trained armies were playing hide and seek with them all over the terrain. The mere factor of physical condition, and not general physical condition, but the particular and special physical fitness trained to perform the peculiar task and meet the special exigencies of service as an infantryman in the field, can only be come at by the most rigorous training.

Any one can charge across an open field. But on that field, seeming from a short distance as flat as the palm of one's hand, the trained infantryman, with his knowledge of the use of ground for cover, is about half as likely to die in such a critical undertaking as the unknowing novice.

THE RIFLE.

The modern rifle is an efficient weapon. Its trajectory is flat up to a considerable range. That is, the bullet in passing through its course over a given distance goes on a level in a plane putting everything in its way in danger, and does not have to describe a curve going up and coming down in order to reach a fairly distant mark. The trained soldier knows this, and knows that the slightest depression in the landscape will give him more or less safety from an enemy rifleman. For instance, a greenhorn, in seeking cover, would naturally choose the slope of a hill away from the enemy, when a trained infantryman would know that he would be in greater safety on the other side of that hill where he would be closer to the enemy, but within that range where the enemy's bullets would travel in a flat trajectory and give him a chance to take advantage of the safety afforded by the slightest depression in the ground, rather than remain behind that hill to suffer the long range plunging fire of the enemy.

How little does the ordinary citizen realize the difficulty of becoming a sharpshooter or expert in the use of the military rifle? Most of us have a vague impression that accurate shooting means merely straight pointing. The ordinary layman has little conception, for instance, of the influence of a slight wind on the course of a rifle bullet at a thousand yards' range. For accurate long-distance shooting this influence of wind upon the bullet must be accurately estimated and allowed for by a graduated instrument on the rifle called a wind gauge, and success or failure in sharp-shooting and sniping may well depend upon the accuracy or inaccuracy with which the problem of windage is solved. There is little understanding by most of us of the effect of light conditions-that with one condition of light there is a tendency to aim too high, and with another condition of light that there is a tendency to aim too low, and that all this must be taken into consideration and accurately estimated and provided for in all fine rifle shooting.

MILITARY ORGANIZATION.

Space does not afford to do more than suggest the thousand details that must be mastered by the proficient officer