Although in the 19 months of American belligerency in the great war we had sent to France upward of two million soldiers, each rifleman among them as he stepped aboard his transport carried his own gun. This weapon, which was to be his comrade and best friend in the perilous months to come, was an American rifle, a rifle at least the equal of any in use by soldiers of other nations, a rifle manufactured in an American plant. It may have been one of the dependable Springfield rifles. More likely, it was a modified 1917 Enfield, built from a design British in fundamental character, but modified for greater efficiency by American ordnance officers after the actual entry of the United States in the great struggle. When it is considered that even a nation of such military genius as France, especially skilled as she was in the construction of military weapons, was three years developing her full ordnance program, even though working at top speed, the rifle production of the United States stands out as one of the feats of the war. The story of the modified 1917 Enfield, which was the rifle on which the American Expeditionary Forces based their chief dependence, is an inspiring chapter in our munitions history. To get this weapon we temporarily forsook the most accurate Army rifle the world had ever seen and straightway produced in great quantities another one, a new model, that proved itself to be almost, if not quite, as serviceable for the kind of warfare in which we were to engage. It is the story of triumph over difficulties, of American productive genius at its best. America, since the days of Daniel Boone a nation of crack shots, was naturally the home of good rifles. Hence, perhaps, it is not surprising that the United States should be the nation to produce the closest shooting military rifle known in its day. This was the United States rifle, model of 1903, popularly called the "Springfield." The Springfield rifle had superseded in our Army the Krag, which we had used in the Spanish-American War. In that conflict the Spanish Army used a rifle of German design, the Mauser. Our ordnance officers at that time considered the Krag to be a more accurate weapon than the Mauser. Still we were not satisfied with the Krag, and, after several years of development, in 1903 we brought out the Springfield, the most accurate and quickest firing rifle that had ever come from an arsenal.