The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost beyond mundane comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like any other great mass, as thousands added their brains and their muscles to its progress it gathered speed until, at the first day of the armistice, it was nearing the point at which it could consume the material resources and turn them out as finished war products up to the capacity of American mechanical skill and machinery to handle them. It had not quite reached that point. Many of the vital but easily manufactured supplies had long since reached the pinnacles of their production curves, but some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manufacture. On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity. For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it--in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes to the thousands of wheels. The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. The liquidation of the war industry was seen to be a matter as complex, as intricate, as full of the possibilities of error and failure as the mobilization itself. In only one respect did demobilization begin with an advantage: there was at hand an organization, the organization which had administered the creation of the Army and the manufacture of its supplies, ready to be turned into a wrecking crew. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ THE LAST SHOT] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ THE ARMISTICE AT A MUNITIONS FACTORY] Balanced against this situation was the countering fact that the men of this organization were war weary. Ahead of them were none of the conspicuous rewards that follow conspicuous war service. The nation does not award medals and other honors to those who restore the conditions of peace. The people themselves were satiated with war and desired nothing so much as a space in which they could forget battles and campaigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job. Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the industrial organization, were men of large personal affairs, serving their country at a sacrifice. For the most part they were disheartened men, denied the satisfaction of seeing the full fruition of their plans have its effect against a hateful enemy. Every interest of personal gain called to them after the armistice to desert their official posts and return to the satisfactions of private endeavor, and only the righteous sense of their duty to the nation held them in the organization.