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.
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