oil, with a
soft wind blowing overhead. And here, in an extraordinary way, the
democracy of a lumber-camp had been reproduced: every one from
the Colonel down was a worker; it was difficult, apart from their
efficiency, to tell their rank.

Early in the morning I started out on a gasolene-speeder to make the
tour. At an astonishing rate, for the work had only been in hand three
months, the vast acreage was being tracked and covered with the sheds.
The sheds were not the kind I had been used to on my own front; they
were built out of anything that came handy, commenced with one sort of
material and finished with another. Sometimes the cross-pieces in the
roofs were still sweating, proving that it was only yesterday they
had been cut down in the nearby wood. There was no look of permanence
about anything. As the officer who conducted me said, "It's all run
up--a race against time." And then he added with a twinkle in his eye,
"But it's good enough to last four years."

This was America in France in every sense of the word. One felt the
atmosphere of rush. In the buildings, which should have been left when
materials failed, but which had been carried to completion by pioneer
methods, one recognised the resourcefulness of the lumberman of the
West. Then came a touch of Eastern America, to me almost more replete
with memory and excitement. In a flash I was transferred from a camp
in France to the rock-hewn highway of Fifth Avenue, running through
groves of sky-scrapers, garnished with sunshine and echoing with
tripping footsteps. I could smell the asphalt soaked with gasolene
and the flowers worn by the passing girls. The whole movement and
quickness of the life I had lost flooded back on me. The sound I heard
was the fate _motif_ of the frantic opera of American endeavour. The
truly wonderful thing was that I should hear it here, in a woodland in
France--the rapid tapping of a steel-riveter at work.

I learnt afterwards that I was not the only one to be carried away by
that music, as of a monstrous wood-pecker in an iron forest. The first
day the riveter was employed, the whole camp made excuses to come
and listen to it. They stood round it in groups, deafened and
thrilled--and a little homesick. What the bag-pipe is to the
Scotchman, the steel-riveter is to the American--the instrument which
best expresses his soul to a world which is different.

I found that the riveter was being employed in the erection of an
immens