h Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in
queer fur caps who work in the bakeries.

I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobile
factory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves of
bread. This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundred
thousand loaves made from the wheat of western Canada! Of all sights
to be seen in this place, however, the reclamation "plant" is the most
wonderful. It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, from
a pair of officer's field-glasses to a nine-inch howitzer carriage is
mended here--if it can be mended. Here, when a battle-field is cleared,
every article that can possibly be used again is brought; and the
manager pointed with pride to the furnaces in his power-house, which
formerly burned coal and now are fed with refuse--broken wheels of
gun-carriages, sawdust, and even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls and
even German prisoners are resoling and patching shoes with the aid
of American machinery, and even the uppers of such as are otherwise
hopeless are cut in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats
are mended by tailors; rusty camp cookers are retinned, and in the
foundries the precious scraps of cast iron are melted into braziers to
keep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the machine-shops the injured guns
and cannon are repaired. German prisoners are working there, too. At a
distance, in their homely grey tunics, with their bullet-shaped heads
close-cropped and the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinder
of a music-box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who had become
rather sullen convicts. Some wore spectacles. A closer view revealed
that most of them were contented, and some actually cheerful. None,
indeed, seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group I saw later,
who were actually building the barbed-wire fence that was to confine
them.

My last visit in this town was to the tiny but on a "corner lot," in
which the Duchess of Sutherland has lived now for some years. As we had
tea she told me she was going on a fortnight's leave to England; and no
Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited over the prospect.
Her own hospital, which occupies the rest of the lot, is one of those
marvels which individual initiative and a strong social sense such as
hers has produced in this war. Special enterprise was required to save
such desperate cases as are made a specialty of here