dding--the daughter
of a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president. To these events
the unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity new
to our social life. In our army camps social life is truly democratic,
as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told. Not alone
have the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but there
is a manifest _will-to-democracy_--the growing of a new flower of
the spirit, sown in a community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity,
perhaps, only in a community of suffering.

The author may seem to have over-praised this Community Club House;
with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appear
fatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so long, on a
building in a remote part of the Middle West: cheap, temporary,
and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection. But of the
transvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building is
an eminent example: it stands in symbolic relation to the times; it
represents what may be called the architecture of Service; it is among
the first of the new temples of the new democracy, dedicated to the
uses of simple, rational social life. Notwithstanding that it fills a
felt need, common to every community, there is nothing like it in
any of our towns and cities; there are only such poor and partial
substitutes as the hotel, the saloon, the dance hall, the lodge room
and the club. It is scarcely conceivable that the men and women who
have experienced its benefits and its beauty should not demand and
have similar buildings in their own home towns.

[Illustration: PLATE VII. INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITY
HOUSE]

Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretch
the cantonments--a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs
and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is the
architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of
Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary
suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the
speculative builder. Neither contain any enduring element of beauty.

But the love of beauty in one form or another exists in every human
heart, and if too long or too rigorously denied it finds its own
channels of fulfilment. This desire for self-expression through beauty
is an important, though little remarked phenomenon of these mid-war
times. At the camps it shows itself in