But the work of Ordnance does not end when the guns cease firing. Far from it. The wear of battle on weapons of all kinds is enormous: guns must be relined and fitted with new recoil mechanisms; shattered wheels and trails must be replaced; broken rifles, pistols, bayonets, machine-guns, scabbards, helmets, trench-knives, periscopes, caissons, limbers, tractors, trucks, tanks, must be collected and transported to the rear for repair or salvage. For the maintenance of its material Army Ordnance had in the field many special facilities: mobile repair-shops, miniature machine-shops mounted on trucks to accompany each division; semiheavy repair-shops mounted on five-ton trailers to accompany each corps; heavy semipermanent repair-shops for each army; railway repair-shops for the railway artillery, each successively less mobile but of greater capacity. In addition to this vast equipment for repair work in the field there were the complete expeditionary base repair-shops, requiring for their operation a personnel three times as large as the peace-time organizations of all the arsenals in the United States put together, capable of repairing each month 2,000 pistols, 7,000 machine-guns, 50,000 rifles, of overhauling 2,000 motor-vehicles, and of relining a thousand cannon. Ordnance once more. And back of all this was the mammoth organization created by Army Ordnance in America itself: arsenals, gun-foundries, rifle and revolver factories, wagon-plants, ammunition-plants, nitrate-plants, silk-mills, tanneries, harness and leather-goods factories, 8,000 manufacturing plants in all, in which nearly 4,000,000 workers toiled day and night to produce the 100,000 separate Ordnance items required by our armies oversea. Beyond the activities that I have just sketched, the Ordnance Department didn’t do much in the war. * * * * *