When America entered the war, problems and needs rose up at every hand, like dragons springing from the ground, and all of them, in all their number and complexity and variety, had to be met and conquered at the same time. None of them was more difficult than this problem of the creation of a munitions industry, for it demanded a highly specialized manufacturing equipment of enormous capacity and great variety which we did not have, concerning which we had in the past known but little and for which we had always had slight regard. We possessed for it neither the plants, the skilled labor nor the experience. New industrial organizations had to be created and financed, plants had to be built, all the complicated and varied weapons of modern scientific warfare had to be designed and manufactured, and so also did many of the great number and variety of the tools with which they would be made. Not only had mechanics to be trained for much of this skill exacting work, but the enormous expansion in the Ordnance Department made necessary rapid development of knowledge and skill among the big proportion of its new members. There is nothing more interesting in the detailed story of the munitioning of our army than the frequency with which one comes upon the statement that “a school was established” for the training of personnel in this, or that, or another phase of ordnance duties. The bare figures of the cost of all this enormous creation and expansion, made many times greater by the necessity of haste at whatever cost, give a vague sort of measuring stick of the energy and the grim purpose that went into the providing of munitions for our army. In a year and a half of war the amount of money expended or obligated for ordnance totaled $13,000,000,000--thirteen times what it cost to run the entire government for a year in the years just before the war. CHAPTER V CARING FOR THE WOUNDED The story of the development of the Medical Department of the Army, its care of the human wreckage of the battlefield and of the physical welfare of the fighting forces both at home and overseas recounts one of the finest and most wonderful of the achievements of the War Department. It is the same story of marvelous expansion in quick time, of high resolve and determined effort to achieve the apparently impossible, and of results that seem almost magical in their bigness and importance and the rapidity with which they were brought about that is true of all the American war activities.