s 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 mean exactly that these men
would choose to spend the rest of their existences in this waste, but
they are happy in the consciousness of a job well done. It was really
inspiring to encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen,
engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an ideal, left their
homes in a remote and peaceful republic three thousand miles away, to
find contentment and a new vitality, a wider vision, in the difficult
and dangerous task they were performing. They were frequently under
fire--when they brought back the wounded or fetched car-loads of
munitions to the great guns on the ridiculous little trains of flat
cars with open-work wheels, which they named--with American humour--the
Federal Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. And their officers
were equally happy. Their colonel, of our regular Army Engineer Corps,
was one of those broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk the
streets of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly and give one a
new pride in the manhood of our nation. Hospitably he drew us out of
the wind and rain into his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove,
cheerfully informing us that, only the night before, the gale had
blown his door in, and his roof had started for the German lines. In a
neighbouring hut, reached by a duck board, we had lunch with him and his
officers baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The American
food, the American jokes and voices in that environment seemed strange
indeed! But as we smoked and chatted about the friends we had in common,
about political events at home and the changes that were taking place
there, it seemed as if we were in America once more. The English officer
listened and smiled in sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant
departure, that America was an extraordinar