The announcement on June 15 that the United States had successfully
carried over three-quarters of a million troops to France, a
distance of more than 3,000 miles by sea, with the statement, made
at the same time, that the Allies had successfully transported
the enormous number of 17,000,000 to and from the various battle
zones, both with absolutely negligible losses, serves to bring up
the interesting question of the movements of vast bodies of men in
earlier wars. Leaving out the primitive wars, in which troops were
moved only by land, and almost wholly on foot, to begin with the
great Persian invasion of Europe, in the fifth century before our
era: Xerxes transported an enormous army, fabled to number five
millions, and certainly reaching nearly half a million combatants,
across the water-barrier of Europe by building a pontoon bridge over
the Hellespont, between three and four miles wide; but the Persians
had also, at Salamis, between 1,000 and 1,200 ships, which was a
sufficiently great achievement in transportation. On the return
invasion of Asia by the Greeks, Alexander the Great likewise crossed
the Hellespont, at the site of the Gallipoli fighting, by a bridge of
boats; the latest crossing of a great army on pontoons being that of
the Russians at the Danube, when they invaded Turkey in 1877. A feat
in transportation of another kind was that of Hannibal, who carried
his mixed army of Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls across the Alps,
probably at Mont Genevre, in the Summer of 218; an achievement later
repeated by Napoleon and the Russian General Suvoroff. A more recent
feat in transportation was the bringing of British and French troops
to America, in the days of Washington. But the closest analogy to the
present achievement of the American Army and Navy is probably that of
the transportation of British troops to South Africa, twenty years ago,
the distance being over 6,000 miles, or about twice the distance of our
Atlantic port from the landing place of our troops in France. The total
British losses in South Africa have more than once been equaled by one
week's British casualties in the present struggle in France, the ratio
of killed to wounded being about the same, namely, one to five.