tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout--as I was inclined to
call him--was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often
driven them serenely across No Man's Land and into the German trenches.
He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck board over the morass,
to where one of these leviathans was awaiting us. You crawl through a
greasy hole in the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as the
turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way to the seat in front
beside that of the captain and conductor, looking out through a slot in
the armour over a waste of water and mud. From here you are supposed to
operate a machine gun. Behind you two mechanics have started the engines
with a deafening roar, above which are heard the hoarse commands of the
captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that the thing is
actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip
on the slime--and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to
your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant
steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and
insurmountable. It is an old German trench which the rains have worn and
widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass
handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on
his haunches, and then gently buries his nose in the pasty clay and paws
his way upward into the field beyond. It was like sitting in a huge
rocking-chair. That we might have had a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I
was informed after I had left the scene of the adventure. It all depends
upon the skill of the driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they
seem.

That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is characteristic of the whole of
this district of levelled villages and vanished woods. Imagine a
continuous clay vacant lot in one of our Middle Western cities on the
rainiest day you can recall; and further imagine, on this limitless lot,
a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a scattering of
contractors' shanties, and you will have some idea of the daily life and
surroundings of one of oar American engineer regiments, which is running
a railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to see these men
and talk with them to be convinced of the truth that human happiness and
even human health thanks to modern science--are not dependent upon an
existence in a Garden of Eden. I do not