I doubt if any branch of the army did more efficient work in its respective line, and received less credit from the public, than the Veterinary Corps. This lack of appreciation was due, in the first place, to public ignorance of the duties of the corps and of the character of its personnel. Most people associate a veterinarian with the old-time country horse-doctor, of rough manners and still rougher speech, who was known to every man and boy in the countryside as “Doc.” The army veterinarian is a different genus altogether. He is usually as smart in appearance and as well-set-up as any officer of the line; he is more often than not a university graduate, and his methods of treatment are as modern and scientific as those of a surgeon or a medical specialist. The impression also seems to prevail that, as a result of the wholesale motorization of artillery and transport and the enormous use of aircraft, animals played but a small part in the Great War, and that consequently the army veterinarian enjoyed something akin to a sinecure. As a matter of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Probably you were not aware that when the war ended, the United States Army possessed close to half a million horses and mules—the exact figure was, I believe, about 470,000—and was purchasing hundreds of more daily. Not only was the task of inspecting and supervising the care of this great body of animals an enormous one, but, as a result of the extreme scarcity of horse-flesh—for buyers for the European armies had almost drained the markets of the world before we entered the war—and because of the lack of tonnage, the animals of the A. E. F. were, as a divisional commander expressed it in a general order, “worth their weight in gold.” Prior to 1916 there were only about 75 veterinarians in the entire army, but with the passage during that year of the National Defense Act the number of veterinarians at the call of the government was materially increased by the creation of the Veterinary Reserve Corps. The Veterinary Corps, like other branches of the service, kept pace with the expansion of the army, and when the Armistice was signed it had on duty 2,200 officers and an enlisted force of more than 21,000 men.