When the war ended we had on hand 52,000 Browning automatic rifles and 29,000 Chauchats—a total sufficient to arm an army of approximately 3,500,000 men. On the same date there were completed 3,340 Hotchkiss, 9,337 Vickers, and 42,050 Browning guns, thus giving us enough heavy machine-guns to equip over 200 divisions, or an army of approximately 7,000,000 men. Thus it will be seen that, no matter what the future has in store for us, it will be a long time before we will have occasion to worry about a shortage in machine-guns. * * * * * Though less novel and, therefore, less interesting than certain other products of Ordnance, there were six items, all produced in stupendous quantities, which rendered greater service than all the big guns, tanks, and airplanes put together in nailing down the coffin-lid on Germany’s dream of world domination. I refer to rifles, pistols, revolvers, bayonets, helmets, and small-arms ammunition. They, with the gas-respirator, the water-bottle, the cartridge-belt, and the pack, constituted the equipment of the fighting Yank. They were the infantryman’s tools of trade. When the news of the sinking of the _Lusitania_ reached Paris, I heard the then American Ambassador to France assert, in the words of Mr. William Jennings Bryan, whose appointee he was, that were the United States to enter the war, a million men would spring to arms overnight. “I’ll admit, Mr. Ambassador,” said a sceptical listener, “that we might get the million men. But where would we get the arms?” “We’d stamp ’em out, sir,” replied the diplomat. “We’d stamp ’em out the way we stamp out tin plates.” But, unfortunately, the matter of supplying weapons for our fighting forces was very far from being as simple as the ambassador seemed to think, for the modern high-power service rifle is a delicately adjusted and highly finished piece of mechanism, to manufacture which requires the finest quality of materials and the highest grade of expert workmanship. So, though we did not realize the dream of the ambassador by producing arms for a million men overnight, American Ordnance performed a feat almost as amazing by producing _enough rifles to equip an army of seven million men in less than fifteen months_.