f the present day. Here we find the most extraordinary
and marvelous effort that history records. France, invaded, occupied,
weakened; France that had no munitions industry prior to 1914--or a
small munitions industry at best--that France has built up a war
industry that is doubtless the best in the world, which is equal to
the German war industry and on which the Allies can draw in the common
cause.

Listen to these figures and keep them in your heads. They are vouched
for by M. Millerand, who was minister of war during the first year of
hostilities:

The Battle of the Marne emptied our storehouses.

On the seventeenth of September, 1914, the minister of war,
who had then been scarcely three weeks in office, was
informed that munitions threatened to fail our artillery,
and that it was necessary without delay to bring to the
front 100,000 shells per day instead of 13,500 for the .75
guns. This was merely a beginning. Three days later, on the
twentieth of September, the minister assembled at Bordeaux
the representatives of the munitions industry and divided
them up into regional groups. At the head of each one he
made one establishment or one individual the responsible
person. In the face of difficulties which could not be
conceived unless they had been overcome, with establishments
diminished in personnel as well as in raw material,
inexperienced for the most part in the complex and delicate
operations which were expected of them, the manufacture of
shells for the .75's mounted from 147,000 which it had been
in the month of August, 1914, to 1,970,000 in the month of
January, 1915, and then to 3,396,000 during the month of
July, 1915.

222 .75 guns per month have been constructed since the month
of May, 1915. 227 were constructed in the month of July, 407
in the month of January, 1916. For this construction, as for
all the others, once a start was made, there was no stopping
it.

All orders for heavy guns had been countermanded at the
beginning of August, 1914. They were resumed in the month
of September, 1914. Seventy-five per cent of the orders for
heavy guns, on which we got along until April, 1917, had
been given out between September, 1914, and the thirty-first
of October, 1915. In the first seven months of the war, from
September, 1914, to April, 19