recuperator for absorbing the shock of recoil when a gun is fired—the recoil mechanism, as it is commonly called. This marvellous device performs a task equivalent to quietly halting the flight of a shell from a 75-mm. field-gun before it has travelled forty inches from the muzzle. So intricate is the mechanism, so delicately adjusted, that although it was introduced twenty years ago, it had never until recently been successfully manufactured outside of France. Though the Germans captured hundreds of these famous guns, the combined engineering skill of Krupp’s, with the model before them, was never able to manufacture a single one. The inherent difficulties encountered in producing these new types of ordnance, great as they were, were dwarfed, however, by the vastness and variety of the quantities involved. Let me see if I can make this clear. Compare the question of ordnance supply with that of subsistence, for example. A man eats no more in time of war than he does in peace. Speaking roughly, it is fifty times as difficult to feed 5,000,000 men as it is to feed 100,000 men, whether the smaller force represents peace conditions and the larger one war conditions, or not. Consequently, the strain thrown upon the organization charged with the feeding of the army increased only in direct numerical proportion to the strength of the army. But, though war did not increase the demand of the individual infantryman for food, it enormously increased his demand for small-arms ammunition. Before the war each infantryman in the United States Army required 276 cartridges a year; during the war this jumped to 2,372 cartridges, an increase of 1,040 per cent. In peace-time each machine-gun used approximately 6,000 rounds of ammunition; after the declaration of hostilities each of these voracious little weapons required 228,875 rounds—an increase of 4,600 per cent. Likewise, the needs of the 3-inch field-guns increased 18,200 per cent and those for 6-inch guns 73,400 per cent over their peace-time requirements. Here is another way of stating the same thing. If a pound of bread a day satisfies a man’s appetite in time of peace, a pound of bread per day will satisfy it in time of war; but if a pound of metal represented the ordnance which he required in time of peace, from 10 to 700 pounds of metal would represent the ordnance which he will require upon going to war.