On the first day of the armistice the War Department was a party to leases obligating it to pay $13,000,000 in rentals annually. By the end of December, 1919, the Real Estate Service had made a large net reduction in the number of leases, and the annual rent bill had dropped to approximately $5,000,000, although in that interval the Service had acquired by lease hundreds of millions of square feet of new storage space. [Illustration: _Photo from Quartermaster Department_ IN AN ARMY RETAIL STORE] [Illustration: _Photo from Quartermaster Department_ CUSTOMERS AT OPENING OF ARMY RETAIL STORE] CHAPTER XVII SELLING THE SURPLUS In our earlier chapters, frequent and more or less extended references have been made to the disposition of surplus property acquired by the various branches of the Army during the World War. In so far as these references have been to surpluses with the American Expeditionary Forces, we have aimed to make the statements complete; but the references to sales of the surplus military property accumulated within the United States have been only incidental, inserted merely to make plain to the reader the extent of the tasks of the various production bureaus after the armistice. This may have seemed haphazard and confusing treatment of what was one of the most interesting and important phases of the demobilization of war industry. We are therefore taking occasion in this chapter to consider this phase--the disposal of the domestic surpluses of war materials--as a whole and in such detail as may be expedient. That same tendency toward centralization which succeeded in placing under one direction the procurement of all war supplies and, after the armistice, the liquidation of the Government’s business engagements, also brought about a unified control of the sale of the surplus materials. Shortly after the armistice there was set up in the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic a Sales Branch under an officer called the Director of Sales. Just as, after the formation of the “overhead” business organization known as the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, the various production bureaus still continued to procure most of their own supplies, but now under the control and authority of the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, so after the armistice these same bureaus sold and otherwise disposed of the surpluses they had acquired, but under the supervision of the Director of Sales. With the exception of a few sales made directly with various foreign governments and companies (property valued at $63,450,000 going in these transactions), the Sales Branch itself engaged in no selling, but merely directed the selling activities of the operating bureaus.