one of the most effective weapons produced by the war, was
repeatedly offered to the American War Department by its inventor,
Major Isaac Newton Lewis, of the United States army, and was as
repeatedly rejected by the officials at Washington. At last, in despair
of receiving recognition in his own country, he sold it to Russia and
Belgium. The Lewis gun, which is air-cooled and weighs only
twenty-nine pounds--less than half the weight of a soldier's
equipment--fires a thousand shots a minute. In the fighting around
Sempst I saw trees as large round as a man's thigh literally cut
down by the stream of lead from these weapons.

The inventor of the Lewis gun was not the only American who
played an inconspicuous but none the less important part in the War
of Nations. A certain American corporation doing business in
Belgium placed its huge Antwerp plant and the services of its corps
of skilled engineers at the service of the Government, though I
might add that this fact was kept carefully concealed, being known
to only a handful of the higher Belgian officials. This concern made
shells and other ammunition for the Belgian army; it furnished
aeroplanes and machine-guns; it constructed miles of barbed-wire
entanglements and connected those entanglements with the city
lighting system; one of its officers went on a secret mission to
England and brought back with him a supply of cordite, not to
mention six large-calibre guns which he smuggled through Dutch
territorial waters hidden in the steamer's coal bunkers. And, as
though all this were not enough, the Belgian Government confided
to this foreign corporation the minting of the national currency. For
obvious reasons I am not at liberty to mention the name of this
concern, though it is known to practically every person in the United
States, each month cheques being sent to the parent concern by