I arrived there at night.  There was no town.  One stepped from the train into the open country.  Far away in the distance there was a glimmering of fires and the scarlet of sparks shooting up between bare tree-tops.  My first impression was of the fragrance of pines and, after that, as I approached the huts, of a memory more definite and elusively familiar.  The swinging of lanterns helped to bring it back:  I was remembering lumber-camps in the Rocky Mountains.  The box-stove in the shack in which I slept that night and the roughly timbered walls served to heighten the illusion that I was in America.  Next morning the illusion was completed.  Here were men with mackinaws and green elk boots; here were cook-houses in which the only difference was that a soldier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman; and above all, here were fir and pines growing out of a golden soil, 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.