e night before, at a dinner party,
the officers had argued against the United States because of the
shipment of supplies to Russia. They said that if the United States
had not aided Russia, that country would not have been able to resist
the invaders. I did not know the facts, but I accepted their
statements. When I was shown the machine guns, I examined them and
discovered that every one of the 400 was made at Essen or Magdeburg,
Germany. Of the 1,300 pieces of artillery every cannon was made in
Germany except a few English ship guns. Kovno was fortified by
_German_ artillery, not American.

A few days later I entered Vilna; this time I was moving with the
advance column. At dinner that night with General von Weber, the
commander of the city, the subject of American arms and ammunition was
again brought up. The General said they had captured from the Russians
an American machine gun. He added that they were bringing it in from
Smorgon to show the Americans. When it reached us the stamp, written
in English, showed that it was manufactured by Vickers Limited,
England. Being unable to read English, the officer who reported the
capture thought the gun was made in the United States.

In Roumania last December I followed General von Falkenhayn's armies to
the forts of Bucharest. On Thanksgiving Day I crossed by automobile
the Schurduck Pass. The Roumanians had defended, or attempted to
defend, this road by mounting armoured guns on the crest of one of the
mountain ranges in the Transylvanian Alps. I examined a whole position
here and found all turrets were made in Germany.

I did not doubt that the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies
had been a great aid to them. (I was told in Paris, later, on my way
to the United States that if it had not been for the American
ammunition factories France would have been defeated long ago.) But
when Germany argued that the United States was not neutral in
permitting these shipments to leave American ports, Germany was
forgetting what her own arms and munition factories had done _for
Germany's enemies_. When the Krupp works sold Russia the defences for
Kovno, the German Government knew these weapons would be used against
Germany some day, because no nation except Germany could attack Russia
by way of that city. When Krupps sold war supplies to Roumania, the
German Government knew that if Roumania joined the Allies these
supplies would be used against German sold