September 1922
His desk was as usual crowded with documents, including those that pertained to the material preparations that could be expected of Central Asia, but they were not what occupied his attention at the moment. Even if there had been shooting conflicts ongoing his work would have required documentation, and records of movement of goods. Shang had sent up a series of papers, hand picked papers, from young Staff Officers which had been about the highlight of his morning. Hodges while here was still nominally the commander of the 8th Division since Shang was currently on temporary duty during the course of summer drill. That meant he was handling the up and coming staff officers while most of the cadre, Hodges included who was only here temporarily for the conference, were looking forward to the election campaigns. He suspected Waite had commissioned the placards that had gone up to encourage 'Success'. Cullen's printing presses were even more obviously his handiwork even without taking note of the gendarmes who festooned their bullpens and working spaces with them voluntarily. Cole had the advantage of being able to spend far more time with his most junior men. Mostly because the lowest rank of gendarmes troopers, the privates, were expected to be lawmen. Their patrols took them into the community regularly and without necessarily expectation of direct action.
A part of Allen envied that closeness that Cole could maintain with his most junior men. The cynical part of his thinking recognized that even Cole wouldn't be able to keep it forever that way. The gendarmes were being expanded... not as fast as the regular army, but it was becoming bigger and like all the others Cole could only be in one place at a time. The training of gendarmes for privates entailed more than the Infantry School that had been the norm up until quite recently.
The training was a talking point with the cadre. It had been a longstanding talking point. For the army was a professional institution, one drawn of volunteers. Even though they had not... except very recently discussed a cavalry, there had been red legs, and engineers, and signals men.
But the cadre had so much to do, not all of them could be focused on the profession of arms. The margins for the railway had been fair in 1914. Western Zhili had made enough in freight even that they could stomached a British style subsidized passenger carry... not that Yuan Shikai would have considered that. Not when most of that freight was coal, which then at that point had gone to selling for cooking and heating purposes.
The war in Europe had meant more demand, and had expedited electrification. It had pushed them to expand. Forty plus percent of the cadre held active military commissions in the army, that rose to over seventy men being involved in uniform for the body with the reserves... and there were a couple of seats that in the new year would need to be filled.
... and would certainly be filled by officers, but they would wait for that until after elections of the lower house.
The present quorum though was insistent that now that the war in Europe was over it was time to take advantage of mid western grain, Kansas and Nebraska and the like, to pad what they could as a guard against famine Corn, and wheat could be stored and kept on hand just in case. There were other reports.
The previous year the Food and Drug Administration, theirs not the states back home, had finished standing up and had issued their recommendations for marking and labelling food. That had been a long time coming. It was something of a point of contention. Food hygiene, and slaughtering of stock for meat... well there had been talks, but also there was the public to consider. Local farmers markets were one thing, but well the states had enacted prohibition but their own food and drug administration had more reason to check the labels and standards for alcohol.
Alcohol was legal, but it was going to be taxed. Tobacco as well. Allen expected the latter though to potentially get complaints from Tietsin, or the consul in Shanghai, but it might not. The British ambassador, never mind his American counterpart would very likely side with them, and it was always possible that the consul of the day would be too taken with moralizing to stand complaints over such taxes by tobacco.
It was equally possible the anglo-american tobacco consortium which grew tobacco in China would keep their mouths shut because they wouldn't want to risk it for their own reasons. Those being that, if they started an argument the Cadre could shut them out entirely, the public might boycott them anyway, and that the Cadre could always adjust the rates for the rail that the tobacco company used to ship across the silk road into Kirghiz That was the advantage of holding a transportation monopoly.
There certainly wasn't going to be a fight this close to the elections... not with the Anglo-American legation in Tietsin enthusiastically voicing support for the voting coming. Shurman thought they were doing well enough, and his cables to Harding were favorable in part because he'd done his stint in the Philippines while most of the Cadre had been in uniform. The man might not have known all the men personally during those days, but he seemed to appreciate that they were on the right track.
Even with the support of both ambassadors it was too late, Allen thought for the rest of China to go to the polls and stock the Federal Legislature here... and that was going to b e a problem. Because, frankly their representatives were pushing for it, and were not happy with the chatter in Peking. Cao Kun was trying to build a consensus, talk about the constitution and this and that, but what it was really doing was showing that the constitution wasn't really how things were run.
It was the dickering and attempts to horse trade instead of fighting bandits. It was the shooting different branches of the beiyang kept getting themselves into, and then when they weren't doing that it was the fighting in Honan. These were all things that made his days more complicated than they otherwise might have been.
Cole was a few minutes earlier than he'd been expected, but not unusually so. The steel documents he passed over were a little unusual. "I'm aware that stepping down production from the war time peak has been a talking point." He commented paging through the documents, before reaching another series of war production documents related to quality control, as well as security deposits for the hand over of goods. "But I assume this has something else to do as well."
"We don't have a port. There is no rail line," No direct rail line to the city, "to Shanghai, but we do bring stuff in, from overseas and we always have but that's been a real shake up over the years." He gestured to still other figures in the table. "Bert has long complained that there is a problem where some of the things that get ordered are stolen on the docks, which don't get me wrong everyone has that problem." and they expected to have that problem in Kirghiz
But it had been a big enough concern with regards to shipping goods to the entente, to England and to Russia with the brits as bursar that when they had started loading goods on to skids for shipping they had insisted that the brits were responsible for approving the goods on site and taking possession and handling shipping. It wasn't just concern over theft, they had no boats to carry them over the water, "We'd already been using pallets to move things around the factories," Especially as the arsenals had been manufacturing more guns, but it had made sense for cloth goods as well... cotton textiles had used them in the states before they'd entered the academy. Then it had only been a matter of time before an engine had been attached to a lifting machine for the pallets, "I assume that your suggestion be related."
He produced a draft of a sheet steel box, "It would require cranes, but we can put these on flat bed train cars, they're shut up so you can't easily steal out of him, and they're steel obvious its not impossible for something to get broke inside but it makes it a hell of a lot less likely."
"What are the drawbacks?"
"The lifting, we can't go any bigger than this container for want of infrastructure. If we try and ship this it'd be too big for the apes in the dockyards to move." Hence his comment on requiring cranes, "Powell wants to get into buying surplus vessels from the shipping board," which would allow the MAK to run US flagged ships but otherwise permit preferential carrying and alleviate one of the great problems the cadre had in selling goods abroad. "These containers can be put on a rail car, we'd have to talk to him though about actually using them, but if he's serious about over the seas trade and ports we could secure both ends of our arrangement."
"Do you think he'll bite?"
"If he's serious about this talk in Liberia, even if he's not packing coffee in one of these would bean easy thing. If we had enough of them."
There were economies of scale in steel manufacturing. Due to the European war's demand for steel larger producers had been able to build up immense cost saving measures which coupled with high panicking high prices of 1917 and 1918 especially for Pig Iron but mild steels and other bulk metal products they'd profited handsomely. After the armistice they had had to step down production, but costs actually increased per unit as the market had moved to peace time levels. "I understand that, but production of this will take time."
"Railways first, ships, trucks later." But with Trucks, that was where the deal with Ford cam in.
"If you can get the MAK to go along with it, we can talk about it next year. With working examples Cole, for peace and war applications." The fighting between Fengtien and Zhili had involved lots of shells.
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Notes: This has been alluded to as forthcoming, we are talking about a precursor to intermodal containers here, because all of the technology for such existed before McClean put it into practice in the early cold war to the point that I really think that part of the resistance was most likely union related for dockworkers, and the infrastructure limitations ofWW1 followed by the great depression before the war.
Its a standard shaped metal box with doors, you just need to build enough of them, and again here, these are smaller than a standard modern shipping container because of those limitations (the idea behind these containers is that they're probably shorter) but again its a standard industrial steel box. Its we know the docks are bad about getting sticky fingers or longshoremen break things because they're drunk on the job (again at work alcoholism pervasive problem).
