Like the storied mill which ground salt until it swamped the ship of the thieving merchant, the mill producing quartermaster supplies before the armistice was hard to stop afterwards, and its output embarrassed the War Department for want of space in which to store the excess supplies. As long as the home Army and the A. E. F. were expanding in size and the convoys grew in size and frequency, there was no critical backing-up of supplies. Immediately after the armistice, however, the order came to ship no more freight to France, except food and other necessaries specifically requested. At the time of the armistice there were 600,000 tons of supplies on the docks in this country and 400,000 other tons moving toward the seaboard. Since the mills kept right on producing more, the flood of new materials inundated the supply service in this country. In December, 1918, the Storage Service was operating 65,000,000 square feet of warehouse space in the United States. A year later it was occupying nearly 400,000,000 square feet, three-fourths of which was leased. A large quantity of this space was open storage, unprotected from the elements. These figures are exclusive of the quantities of warehousing and open storage occupied by the various technical bureaus, such as the Ordnance Department, the Air Service, and the Signal Corps. The operation of the general storage facilities was the charge of the Director of Storage, one of the chief functionaries of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. An even greater problem than storage was the disposition of the enormous surpluses of goods which accumulated after the armistice. The first concern of the War Department in approaching this question was the military future of the United States. In 1914 much was made of the thoroughness of German military preparation, which had been such that, when the fatal hour struck and the conscripts by hundreds of thousands left their homes and poured into the German barracks, for every man there was waiting ready a uniform, shoes, a helmet, underclothing, and everything needed to prepare him immediately for service in the field. What Germany had been able to accomplish by premeditated, long, and expensive effort, the United States now derives as a by-product of the war Germany forced it to fight. America, too, is now prepared in these minute details. Before any of the surplus quartermaster stocks were set aside for sale or other disposition, a complete and balanced selection of uniforms, overcoats, underclothing, socks, caps, shoes, and other nonperishable articles in the individual equipment of troops, in quantities sufficient to outfit an army of approximately 1,000,000 men, was set aside and placed in indefinite storage. In addition, stores of such supplies were retained for the future consumption of the regular standing Army, of the National Guard, and of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.