NATURAL RESOURCES—LITTLE. 215 
as a military supply, but of substantial importance is the garbage, 
from which the British extracted glycerine at a saving of $1,000 a 
ton. 
To furnish drinking water on the march provision was made for 
22,000 drinking water carts, in many of which the water was carried 
in canvas bags, while to remove delinquent members of the soldier’s 
dental equipment the horrors of war were increased by the activities 
of more than 47,000 teeth-extracting forceps. The other side of the 
picture may be indicated by the solace afforded by shipments of a 
monthly average of 20,000,000 cigars, 425,000,000 cigarettes, and a 
ration of candy which involved 34 million pounds in a single month. 
Even chewing gum found its place as a military supply of recognized 
and great value on the march as a substitute for water. 
The building program forced upon us by the war involved thou- 
sands of structures to meet the most diverse requirements and a 
far greater expenditure than that of all the construction operations 
in 150 of our largest American cities in any single year. Sixteen 
complete cities, each ready for 40,000 inhabitants, and 16 tent camps 
were completed in less time than it takes to build an ordinary subur- 
ban dwelling house. In little more than a year new housing had 
been provided for a population equal to that of Philadelphia. 
Forty bed hospital wings were erected, painted, equipped, and 
plumbed in 10 hours. At Nashville, Tenn., and at Nitro, near 
Charleston, W. Va., vast industrial plants, designed in the one case 
for the production of 1,000,000 pounds and in the other for an output 
of 625,000 pounds of smokeless powder per day were built, equipped, 
and put in operation with extraordinary speed. 
Houses went up to the value of $2,000,000 a day. All this means 
a flow of construction material without parallel in the history of 
the world. Lumber and wall board, window glass and roofing, 
nails by the billion, brick and cement and structural steel—all to a 
total of millions of tons—took their place in the finished structures. 
All the factories in the United States could not meet the demands 
for metal piping. But the cantonments were merely an incident 
in the building program, which included also enormous powder 
plants, huge terminal docks, warehouses and storage depots cover- 
ing almost 900 acres, hundreds of miles of railroads, proving grounds, 
arsenals, chemical plants, and more than a thousand miles of road. 
The supplies required for the health, comfort, and diversion of 
our troops were of the most miscellaneous character, ranging from 
raincoats, slickers, and 4,000,000 pairs of rubber boots to furs for 
the Siberian expedition. They included 200,000 sheets of band music 
and 143,000 musical instruments. The requisition for 500,000 pillows 
disclosed a shortage in feathers, and after the ducks in the United 
