The same was true, though in lesser measure, of the great French, Italian, and Austrian ordnance concerns. We in the United States, however, had nothing of the sort. The Bethlehem Steel Company manufactured a limited amount of artillery, it is true, and the Colt, Winchester, Savage, and Remington corporations manufactured small arms, though mainly for sporting purposes, but they made them without any hope of government encouragement or co-operation, and they marketed them in foreign countries without any save the most casual assistance from our diplomatic and consular officials. In certain cases, indeed, the government actively discouraged American arms manufacturers from disposing of their wares to foreign belligerents. By the assurance of steady employment and lucrative remuneration the great European ordnance manufacturers attracted to their employ men of exceptional technical ability, thus forming a large and highly trained personnel with long experience in manufacturing the tools of war. The traditional policy of the United States, on the contrary, was to maintain in government employ a small, a very small, group of technically trained officers who, according to our careless American theory, would be able to design and produce enough ordnance to meet the needs of our army in the remote and unlikely contingency that we should ever become involved in war. How ridiculously inadequate was this personnel will be realized when I say that there were but ninety-seven officers in the Ordnance Department at the outbreak of the war. How enormous were the requirements of the suddenly embattled nation is strikingly emphasized by the fact that 11,000 Ordnance officers were required for our first 5,000,000 men. All other branches of the service underwent similar expansion to a greater or less extent, it is true, but whereas Signal Corps officers could be recruited from the telegraph and telephone companies, Motor Transport officers from the automobile industry, Railway Transport officers from the great railway systems, Medical officers from the ranks of the country’s surgeons and physicians, Engineer officers from the various branches of the engineering profession, Quartermaster officers from the packing and produce concerns, the clothing manufacturers, and the building trades, paymasters from the banks and financial institutions, judge-advocates from the members of the bar, there was no field of American endeavor to which the War Department could turn for officers trained in the highly technical and specialized profession of ordnance design and manufacture. How could there be? There had never been any demand for tanks, for trench-mortars, for airplane drop-bombs. Ergo, there was no one in this country who possessed other than a vague and theoretical knowledge of how to design or manufacture them. Therefore, we had to set about training men to do these things. And we could not train these men in a week or a month. Ordnance designing,