Now I wish to lay special emphasis on the fact that when the United States decided to manufacture gas, and to manufacture it in hitherto undreamed-of quantities, we were embarking on strange and uncharted seas. We manufactured almost everything else under the sun, but of the production of these toxic-gases we knew little save in theory, because virtually their only commercial value was in the making of certain dyes and chemicals, for which we had depended almost wholly on Germany. It was a new game which we had to learn—and to learn quickly. We found ourselves in the position of a baseball-player who is unexpectedly called upon to bowl in a game of cricket on which the championship depends. But when word went out from Washington that chemists were needed to beat the Germans at their own game, the masters of the retort and the test-tube left their classrooms and closed their laboratories and from every corner of the republic came flocking to the colors. I am using no mere figure of speech when I assert that the mammoth gas industry which was built up from nothing in less than a twelvemonth, knowledge of which was without question largely contributory to breaking down the German morale, was the work of American college professors. Some one, an Englishman, if I remember rightly, once referred to Germany as “the land of damned professors.” When their batteries and battalions were sent reeling back by American-made gas, the Germans must have felt like applying the same term to the United States. Notwithstanding the remarkable standard of efficiency which it ultimately attained, the Chemical Warfare Service, or the Gas Service, as it was originally called, passed through a checkered and stormy formative period. By the close of 1917, when we had already been at war for nine months, there was hardly a branch of the American Army which did not have a finger in the affairs of gas warfare. The manufacture of masks was under the direction of the Medical Corps. Gas and shell production was in the hands of the Ordnance Department. Alarm devices were produced by the Signal Corps. The gas and flame troops formed the 30th Regiment of Engineers. Field-training was directed by the Sanitary Corps. Research work, an extremely important phase, was carried out by the Bureau of Mines, a branch of the Department of the Interior. And, to complete the decentralization, arrangements were being made to form a chemical service section of the National Army for the purpose of conducting gas operations overseas.