The French Government itself, by direct purchases from the A. E. F., took 50,000 animals at an average price of $190.21 a head. Thousands of surplus animals at good prices went to the governments of Belgium, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Bavaria. To civilians in France and Germany went 85,000 A. E. F. animals. Approximately the last of the original 243,000 had been sold when the final troops of the A. E. F. departed for the United States in the late summer of 1919. Although we sent to France some of the finest mules in America (and, therefore, in the world), there was at first some difficulty in disposing of them to the French buyers. The farmers of southern France knew the mule and justly valued it, and during the early months of the demobilization a constant stream of American army mules went into that region for sale. Finally the southern French mule market became glutted, and then it became necessary to “sell” the mule to the farmers in the American areas in northern France. The French peasants did not hold the mule’s clouded ancestry against him, but what their thriftiness did object to was his dearth of hope of posterity. However, after a few of the peasants had bought and worked the army mules, the good qualities of the animal became widely advertised, and thousands of them thereafter were bought at good prices. After the armistice the first step in the liquidation of the quartermaster war business and of the other enterprises conducted by the Director of Purchase in the United States was to terminate the industry and to settle with the contractors, of whom, as is indicated above, there were approximately 15,900--parties to agreements which committed the United States to purchase supplies to the value of more than $7,800,000,000. A large part of these were quartermaster supplies, but they also included motor vehicles and engineering, medical, signal corps, and general supplies, the procurement of which, under the reorganization of the War Department, was placed in the hands of the Director of Purchase. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ A. E. F. SUPPLY TRAIN ON WAY TO RATION DUMP] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ A. E. F. FLOUR ON WAY TO STARVING AUSTRIA] The immediate result of the armistice was to silence the activity in these thousands of factories. The Director of Purchase sent broadcast by telegraph a general request to suspend all production while the War Department could estimate its position. After a few days the mills were permitted to resume production. Subsequently about 5,000 of the contracts were allowed to go through to completion. The remaining 11,000 were terminated either abruptly, as with those under which no production had started, or by graduation, when that was advantageous either to the Government or to the industrial situation. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ A. E. F. HORSES TO BE SOLD] [Illustration: _Photo from Quartermaster Department_